A World of Difference

I

Irv Levitt pumped away on the exercise bike. Sweat clung greasily to his skin and matted his dark brown hair. He tossed his head. That was a mistake he still made after eight months in space. Little drops spread in all directions.

The anthropologist swore and mopped them out of the air with a soft, absorbent cloth like a big diaper. Without mopping up, the sweat would float around until it hit something-or someone. Jamming six people into a ship as cramped as Athena was tough enough without troubles like that.

Levitt worked the bike with grim intensity until finally, mercifully, the timer rang and let him off the hook. Then he toweled himself off and pushed himself out of the tiny exercise chamber and past the three sleeping cubicles.

On his way by, he stuck his head through the privacy curtain of his own chamber for a moment. The light inside was dim and red; his wife Sarah was tethered to the foam mattress, asleep. He smiled a little and went on to the control room.

Patricia and Frank Marquard were already there, watching the monitor as Minerva flowed by below at almost 19,000 miles an hour. Levitt saw the longing on their faces. It mirrored his own: like him, they wanted nothing more than to get down to the planet so they could start working. She was a biologist, her husband a geologist.

At the moment, the monitor showed mostly ice. That was not surprising; each of Minerva’s polar caps reached about halfway to the equator, the northern a bit more, the southern a bit less. Sometimes the planet looked so frigid and forbidding that even a glance could make Levitt shiver.

Not now, though. The Athena moved north past the edge of the southern polar cap. Through cloud cover, Levitt glimpsed one of the long, deep gorges that channeled meltwater from the icecaps to the seas and lakes of the southern tropics every Minervan spring.

“I think I’d kill for a shower about now, even in water that cold,” he said.

Pat Marquard nodded rueful agreement. “Disinfectant wipes just aren’t the same,” she said. “I’m sick of smelling like an infirmary. I’m sick of short hair, too, and even sicker of having it smell like an infirmary.” Back on Earth, her hair had been a curly blond waterfall that went halfway down her back; she was vain about it. Keeping it only a couple of inches longer than Frank’s had given her something to complain about ever since Athena left the American space station.

“I could go for a shower, too, but I’m not looking forward to gravity again,” Frank said.

Levitt glared at him half seriously. “You have the nasty habit of pointing out things we’d all rather not think about. Just working the bike leaves my legs sore. Having to hold myself up again, walk, run-“ He broke off, shaking his head in distaste.

“We may have to do some running,” Pat said quietly.

She let it drop there, but her eyes, her husband’s, and Irv’s automatically went to one of the two pictures taped above the monitor: the Viking photo. It shared pride of place with Galileo’s first sketch of Minerva through the telescope, but Galileo’s drawing got short shrift. Sometimes Irv stared at the Viking shot so hard that he ignored the planetary view under it. That picture was the reason for Athena, and the reason it had an anthropologist, it had him-aboard: the only glimpse humanity had ever had of another intelligent race.

Ever since Viking was destroyed, people had been searching for words to describe Minervans-or at least this Minervan, Levitt reminded himself; nobody had any idea how typical he, she, or it was. “Fat hat-rack” was about the best short phrase anyone had come up with, and even the learned articles in Science and Nature had not done much better than that.

The creature was essentially cylindrical, better than six feet tall, and about a foot and a half across through most of its height. Half a dozen short, stumpy legs were equally spaced around its base. A like number of arms ringed its torso about a foot below the top; a ring of six eyes sprouted from the bulge there.

No mouth was visible. Some people wondered if the Minervan had one. if so, was it on the side away from the Viking’s camera, or in the center of the top part? Levitt would have bet on the latter; the Minervan looked to be radially symmetrical, not built on the bilateral pattern more common on Earth. He was willing to admit he was just guessing, though.

Each of the Minervan’s legs ended in three claws, each arm in three fingers. Two arms held the Artifact, as the anthropologists had dubbed it. Levitt had no idea what the thing was supposed to be for: it could have been a crook, a flail, a pole vaulter’s pole, anything. He doubted it was intended as a wrecking bar, but it had done the job plenty well.

“Junior doesn’t look as though it’d be very fast,” he said musingly.

“Neither are we, relative to the rest of the big mammals,” Pat said. “We have things besides speed going for us. So do the Minervans, I’ll guarantee you that.”

“That ‘relative’ is a good point, Pat,” Frank Marquard put in. “Without knowing what the local competition is, we can’t tell whether Junior’s a sloth or a gazelle.”

“You’ve been listening to your wife too much. Comes of sharing a cubicle with her, I suppose,” Irv said. He tried to remember when they had started calling the Minervan Junior and failed. Sometime very early on in the flight, anyway. “Me, I don’t care how fast Junior is by local standards. I just want to know whether I can outrun it if it decides to swing the Artifact at me.”

“Now who sounds like me?” Pat said, and poked him in the ribs. “That’s what I said a minute ago. You should spend more time with Sarah; then you and she would be echoing each other.”

“She’s asleep back there. Doing the last set of bloods and getting the data back to Houston took longer than she thought it would-that glitch showed up in the software again.” Sarah Levitt was an M.D. who specialized in biochemistry but was out of med school recently enough not to have forgotten what people were all about, either: a natural for Athena. For that matter, Irv knew that being married to her had not hurt his own chances.

“By now, everyone on this ship sounds like everybody else,” Frank said.

“In a pig’s ear we do.” Emmett Bragg glided through the cabin like a shark sliding through a tropical lagoon. If ever a man was made for freefall, Irv thought for the hundredth time, Emmett Bragg was the one. The pilot was close to fifty, a decade older than anyone else aboard Athena, and the only real astronaut on the crew. Before NASA, he had flown Phantoms in Vietnam. Once he had stayed loose on the ground for three days until a chopper got him out after his plane went down south of Haiphong.

Frank laughed. “Nobody wants to imitate that mouthful of grits you talk through, Emmett. What do the Russians think of it, anyway?”

Still without a wasted motion, Bragg strapped himself into the commander’s seat. “Matter of fact, the accent interests ‘em. One of ‘em said to me once I sounded like I was from Georgia.

I told him, naw, Alabama.”

Frank snorted, and Pat giggled.

“He meant Stalin country, Emmett, not where the Braves play,” Irv said.

“I know,” Bragg said calmly. “But it doesn’t hurt any to have the boys on the other side take you for a natural born fool.” He checked the radar screen. A blip was showing: the Tsiolkovsky, coming up over the Minervan horizon. “Right on time,” Levitt said.

Bragg nodded. “They haven’t been playing with their orbit again, anyhow.” He had worn a crew cut when it was stylish, kept it through the years when it wasn’t, and still had it now that it was in again. The only difference was that gray streaked it now. He picked up the radio mike. “Zdrast’ye, Tsiolkovsky,” he said, and went on in Russian that was accented but fluent. “All well aboard?”

“Very well, thank you, Brigadier Bragg.” Colonel Sergei Tolmasov sounded like an Oxford don. Just as the Americans used Russian to talk to the Soviet ship, the crew of the Tsiolkovsky always replied in English. Tolmasov’s dry wit went well with the slightly fussy precision he brought to the language. “Good to find you in your expected place, old fellow.”

“We were thinking the same thing about you,” Bragg said. The Tsiolkovsky had changed orbits several times in the week since it and Athena had reached Minerva. Had each burn not taken place on the far side of the planet from Athena, Levitt would have been happier about believing the Russians when they said the maneuvers were just to enhance their observations. As things were, he had not been sorry when Bragg also started jinking. “Let them worry, too,” the pilot had said.

Now Tolmasov remarked, “I will be glad when we are all on the ground, and this foolish maneuvering can cease.”

“Agreed,” Bragg said at once. “We’ll be too busy cheating the natives to worry so much about each other.”

“Ah-quite,” Tolmasov replied after a moment’s pause. “There are times, Brigadier, when I must confess myself uncertain as to how facetious you are being. Tsiolkovsky out.”

Bragg chuckled. “Sometimes I wonder myself, Sergei Konstantinovich. Athena out.” When the mike was dead, he fell back into English. “The other thing I wonder about is whether all this back-and-forth with the Russians will end up making a fulltime liar out of me.”

“’Too busy cheating the natives,’ “Tolmasov echoed. “I like that. I only wish I could believe it.”

“We should send a recording of that remark back to Baikonur,” said Oleg Lopatin, the only other Russian in the control room when Tolmasov spoke to Athena. “It shows how the Americans are already planning to exploit the people of Minerva.”

“He was just joking, Oleg Borisovich,” Tolmasov said. His Russian did not share the arid perfection of his English.

Lopatin’s heavy eyebrows came down in a frown. “You did not seem so certain of that when you were talking with him.”

“Never show all you know,” Tolmasov said. He did not bother pointing out that that also applied to his dealings with Lopatin, who was KGB. Tolmasov sighed. Things being as they were, that was inevitable. At least Lopatin was also a perfectly able electronics engineer and, by Russian standards, computer man. That gave him some real use aboard Tsiolkovsky, aside from his value to Moscow.

Tolmasov looked around the control room and sighed again. He knew that, with its round analog dials instead of slick digital readouts, it would have seemed old-fashioned to Bragg. The panels full of glowing green numbers he had seen in pictures and tapes of Athena and other American spacecraft seemed- what was the American slang? glitzy to him. All what you’re used to, he thought.

But he did envy his opposite number the computer power under those panels. Every one of Tsiolkovsky’s orbit-changing burns had been calculated back on Earth. Athena, he was sure, had figured its own. Partly that was a difference in approach. Ever since the earliest days, the Soviet space program had relied more heavily on ground control than the Americans.

The technology gap did exist, though. The big Russian boosters let Tsiolkovsky carry a lot more weight to Minerva than Athena could. The engineering on the life-support system was solid, or he wouldn’t be here worrying. But Bragg had a lot more data processing capacity than he did, and down on Minerva there would be nothing but data to process. He worried some more.

While he was at it, Tolmasov spent a little while worrying about Bragg. Envy mixed in with the worry there, too. The colonel was out of Frontal Aviation; his flight experience before being tapped for cosmonaut training was all in MiG2Ts and other attack aircraft. Without false modesty, he knew he was good. But he had never seen combat; he had left his squadron a few months before they flew against the Sixth Fleet’s Tomcats during the Third Beirut Crisis. He wondered how much difference that made.

Not much, he tried to tell himself. He had done everything but. Still, Russian and English both had a word for somebody who had done everything but sleep with a girl. The word was virgin.

That turned Tolmasov’s mind in another direction. He smoothed his short, light brown hair. It was not as neatly trimmed, of course, as it had been when Tsiolkovsky set out from Earth orbit. Eight months of amateur barbering had left everyone on the ship a little ragged. Tolmasov knew, though, that ragged or not he still kept his good looks: like so many Russians, he had a face that would somehow contrive to seem boyish and open until he was well into his fifties. And those evil days, fortunately, were a good many years away yet.

He gave his attention back to Lopatin. “I’m going aft for some rest, Oleg Borisovich. Call me at once if anything unusual happens, or if there is any unscheduled communication from Earth.”

“Of course,” Lopatin said. “Rest well.”

His voice held no irony. Even with curtains, even with a bigger ship than Athena, privacy hardly existed aboard Tsiolkovsky. Tolmasov missed it less than most Americans would have. He had grown up with a brother and three sisters in a two bedroom apartment in Smolensk, and his father was not badly off. It was, he realized wryly as he pulled himself from handhold to handhold down the corridor to the laboratory, good practice for the life of a cosmonaut.

He heard a centrifuge whir and looked into one of the chambers. “Well, Doctor,” he said, smiling, as he glided in. “Are we healthy?” The question was a way to start a conversation, but also seriously meant: if anything was wrong, Tolmasov needed to know about it right away.

Dr. Zakharova checked a reading, squinted, checked again, then nodded. “Healthy enough, after so much freefall. The new calcium supplement seems better than the last one we tried.”

“That’s good, Katerina Fyodorovna. I’m glad to hear it.” Again, Tolmasov felt his words bearing two meanings. He was not looking forward to being under gravity again-even less so if he and his comrades suffered more than they had to from the weakened bones brought on by prolonged weightlessness. Moreover… “Have your tests reached a point where you can stop for a while?”

The doctor raised an eyebrow and smiled a little. “I think so,” she said. She was a small, dark woman with startling blue eyes. Tolmasov was no longer sure whether she really was pretty. As the only woman on Tsiolkovsky, by now she looked good to him-and, he was sure, to the other four men in the crew.

Afterward, in his cabin, they sat in midair, her legs still wrapped around his back. Freefall did not have many advantages, but sex was one of them. Tolmasov kept a grip on a handhold, so he and Katerina would not drift out through the curtain into the corridor. “A pleasant way to pass the time,” he said.

“I’m glad you think so.” She raised that eyebrow again.

He’d expected her to; after so long, few surprises were left between crew members. It had to be a lot like being married, he thought.

That brought Athena, always in the back of his mind, up to the front. The Americans had tried to solve the problem of sexual tension by putting three married couples aboard. They hailed it as a triumph of equality. Tolmasov could not see that-he doubted any combination of couples would get the Americans’ best people to Minerva. And Minerva was too important for anything less than the best.

The Soviet selection boards had thought as he did. If that meant life aboard Tsiolkovsky sometimes got complicated, too bad. Fortunately, Katerina was as fine a woman-as fine a person-as she was a physician. He wondered if the boards had chosen her for that, too. Probably not, he decided. Otherwise they would never have come up with Igor Lopatin.

He grimaced. Had Katerina been as crabbed and dour as the engineer, life aboard Tsiolkovsky would have been a lot worse than complicated. It would have been intolerable, and maybe dangerous. He ran a grateful hand down the smooth skin of her back, glad she favored him at the moment.

She stirred and detached herself from him. “Now,” she said, “back to work.” She retrieved her underpants and coverall from the little bag where she had stowed them. Tolmasov used a tissue to mop liquid out of the air. Katerina chuckled. “To the head first, then back to work,” she amended with a doctor’s practicality. As soon as she was dressed, she slipped out of the cubicle and away.

Tolmasov put his clothes back on more slowly. It was not animal lassitude; he was too disciplined to let that affect him. Calculation played a much bigger part in it. Someone besides Oleg Lopatin, he was sure, had KGB connections. That was the way things were. Katerina made the most obvious choice: if anyone on the ship could find out everything that was going on, she was the one.

Of course, the KGB did not have a reputation for being obvious. Tolmasov let out a snort of laughter. If Katerina was not what he suspected her to be, she doubtless had suspicions about him.

A drop of water fell from the castle ceiling onto Reatur’s head.

He extended an eyestalk and stared balefully upward at the ice. Was it starting to drip already? Plainly, it was. Summer was coming.

Reatur was not happy about summer. It would be too hot; it always was. Most of the tools made of ice would melt; they always did. The domain master would have to see to getting the stone tools out of storage, as he did toward the end of every spring.

He did not like stone tools. They were hard to make and expensive to buy. His peasants did not like them, either. They were heavier than ice and tiring to use in the fields. He wished he lived in a land with a better climate, where ice stayed ice the year around.

Even his castle’s thick walls would drip and trickle all summer long. He remembered the really scorching summer-how long ago was it? Seven years, that was it-when big chunks of the roof had melted and fallen in. Lucky his domain had been at peace then, and lucky the collapse had killed only mates.

Reatur’s eldest son Ternat came into the great hall, breaking his chain of thought. Ternat thickened his body so the top of his head was lower than the top of Reatur’s. “You are respectful,” the domain master said, pleased, “but I know you are taller than I.”

“Yes, clanfather.” Ternat resumed his natural height. “A male from the great clan of Skarmer waits outside. He would have speech with you.”

“Would he?” Air hissed out through the breathing pores under Reatur’s eyestalks. “I wonder what he wants.” Visits from the males who lived on the west side of the Ervis Gorge were never casual affairs; the gorge was too hard to cross for anything but serious business to be worthwhile. “Bring him in.”

“Yes, clanfather.” Ternat hurried away. He was eldest, but he knew better than to do anything without his father’s leave. One day, if he outlived Reatur, he would be clanfather himself, and domain master. Till then, he was as much in his father’s power as a just budded mate.

He led the Skarmer male up to the domain master. The westerner politely widened himself before Reatur, though like most of his people he was already the shorter and rounder of the two. That peculiar combination of plump body and long eyestalks always made the males from west of the gorge look sneaky to Reatur.

Still widened, the Skarmer male said in trade talk, “I bring my clanfather Hogram’s greetings to you, domain master, and those of all the domains sprung from the Skarmer bud. I am named Fralk; I am eldest of eldest of Hogram.”

Reatur felt like hissing again but refused to let this Fralk see his surprise. Not only did the westerner have plenipotentiary power-Reatur was not even sure how many domains there were on the far side of the gorge-but he was also in line to become clanfather of his domain.

“I am pleased to receive such a prominent emissary,” Reatur said, more polite than ever. Then, still without abandoning his manners, he started to get down to business. “To what do I owe this privilege?”

“A moment, if you please, before I come to that,” Fralk said. “I have heard from merchants and travelers of a curious-well, a curious thing that you keep here. May I see it? Travelers’ tales are often wild, but the ones that have come to me have enough substance to be intriguing, I must confess.”

“Odd you should mention the strange thing. When Ternat announced you, I was just thinking about the summer I found it,” Reatur said. “Come this way. In deference to your rank, I will not even ask any price of you.”

“You are generous.” Fralk widened again, then trailed after Reatur and Ternat toward the side chamber where the domain master kept the strange thing.

That chamber’s outer wall had much less sand and gravel mixed with its ice than was true of the rest of the castle. As Reatur had intended, more sunlight came through that way; the room was almost as bright as day.

Fralk walked all around the strange thing, looking at it with four eyes and barely managing to keep a polite pair on his hosts. Reatur understood that. When he had first found the strange thing, he had stared with all six eyes at once, lifting the stalk on the far side of his body over his head. He remembered that that had only made matters worse. He was so used to seeing all around him all the time that having a big part of his field of vision blank left him disoriented. He had wanted to lean in the direction his eyes were pointing.

Fralk was leaning a little himself. He noticed and recovered. At last he said, “This once, the tales are less than truth. I have never seen anything like that.”

“Neither had I when I came across it, nor have I since,” Reatur said, and meant it. He looked at the strange thing almost every day, and it still made no sense to him. With all those sharp angles-more than on any eighteen things he usually came across-it did not seem as though it had any right to exist. Yet there it was.

“How did you find it?” Fralk asked.

The domain master had told the tale many times. Somehow, though, maybe because Fralk was a male who displayed extraordinarily good manners, it came out fresher than it had in years. “I was out hunting nosver.”

“I’ve heard of them,” Fralk said. “We don’t have them in the Skarmer domains.”

“You’re lucky. They’re dreadful pests. By the tracks, a male and his whole band of mates had come down to raid the fields. I trailed them back to the low hills east of the castle. That summer was so hot that when I felt dry, I couldn’t find any ice or snow to pick up and put in my mouth. I had to lie down fiat and dip my head in a puddle of water.”

“Annoying,” Fralk said sympathetically. “That always makes my gut itch.”

“Mine, too. Miserable stuff, water. The nosver, curse ‘em, like it, you know. They splashed along a stream coming off a tongue of ice till I couldn’t smell ‘em anymore, and I wasn’t having any luck finding their prints on the far side, either. You can imagine how happy I was.”

“I don’t blame you a bit,” Fralk said. He really was a fine fellow, Reatur thought.

The domain master went on. “So there I was, grouchy as all get out and with the start of some really fierce indigestion. I came round a boulder and almost bumped right into-that.” He pointed at the strange thing. “I looked at it, and looked at it. And then it moved.”

“It did what?” Fralk said, startled.

“Moved,” Reatur insisted. “An arm came out of its bottom and stuck itself into the ground. I tell you, I almost voided where I stood-I daresay the damned water I’d drunk had something to do with that, too. I never imagined the strange thing could be alive. I didn’t stop to think. I just took a whack at it with the stave I was carrying.”

“I would have done the same thing,” Fralk said. “Or else run.”

“I hit it over and over. What a racket it made! It was hard, harder than anything alive has any right to be. Feel for yourself if you like-it’s like midwinter ice, or even stone. It didn’t fight back, and all I can say is that I’m glad. I only quit hitting it when pieces came off. If it wasn’t dead then, it never would be.”

“Has it moved since?” Fralk asked.

“No; I guess I did kill it. My sons and grandsons and I spent days hauling it back here to the castle.”

“What a job that was,” Ternat said, whistling with remembered strain.

“Yes,” Reatur agreed. “It made me wonder all over again how the strange thing could ever have been alive. It’s as heavy as stone, and as hard to get from place to place. But it did move by itself.”

Fralk turned an extra couple of eyestalks on it again. “You could tell me it sang songs and I would not argue with you. It might do anything; it might do nothing.”

“It’s done nothing since it’s been here,” Ternat said.

“Well, not quite,” Reatur said. “Most travelers I charge food or tools to see it. Over the years, now that I think, it’s earned me a tidy sum.”

“That I do believe,” Fralk said. “It’s worth traveling a long way to see.”

A well-spoken young male indeed, Reatur thought. “Guest with me tonight,” he said expansively. “My ice is yours.”

“I thank you,” Fralk said. Then he proceeded to wreck the fine impression he had made, for he took the old proverb literally. He reached out a couple of arms, used his fingerclaws to scrape a good handful of ice from the wall, and put it in his mouth. “Very nice,” he said.

Reatur saw Ternat turn yellow with anger. The domain master glanced down at himself. He was the same color, and no wonder. “Envoy of the Skarmer domains, you forget yourself,” he said. His voice was stiff as glacier ice in midwinter.

“No, domain master, I do not. For this I was sent here.” Fralk took more ice and put it in his mouth as’ calmly as if he were munching it from the walls of his own castle. Suddenly, his politeness seemed something he had assumed at will, not native to him.

“This is insolence,” Reatur said. “Why should I not send you back to your clanfather without the arms you have used to prove it?”

Fralk spun round in a circle. “Which arms are those?” he asked when he stopped. Yes, he was mocking Reatur. “Any two will do,” the domain master growled.

He had to give Fralk reluctant credit; the Skarmer envoy went neither blue from fear nor an angry yellow. “You would be unwise to take them,” Fralk said. He was the very odor of good manners again. Reatur, whose moods ran fast and deep, began to see why this young male had been chosen ambassador. Like smooth ice reflecting the sun and hiding whatever lay beneath, he did his clanfather’s bidding without revealing himself in the process.

“We come down to it, then,” Reatur said, still trying to provoke a reaction from him. “Why should I not?”

“Because I aim to inherit this domain from you,” Fralk said.

“That is why I treated it as my home to be.”

The chamber with the strange thing had no weapons in it. Reatur knew that. His encircling eyes glanced around it anyway, just in case. One of the things he saw was Ternat’s eyestalks twisting in a similar search. Another was that Fralk had turned blue. He was afraid now.

If he had been standing on Fralk’s claws, Reatur would have been more than afraid. “Shall I think you have gone mad, and set you free on that account?” he said. “I could almost believe it. Why else would you speak so, in the presence of a domain master and his eldest?”

Fralk slowly regained his greenish tint. “Because, the domains that come from the first bud of Skarmer grow straitened in their lands. Just as mates must bud, Skarmer must grow.”

“How?” Reatur thought about what he knew of the lay of the land west of the Ervis Gorge: not much. But one piece of knowledge came to him. “Are not all the domains in the west Skarmer, all the way to the next Great Gorge?”

“They are,” Fralk said. “We will be coming to the east, across the Ervis Gorge.”

“He lies!” Ternat exclaimed. “What will the Skarmer domains do, send one male at a time across the rope bridge? Let them. After we have slain the first warrior, and the second, and if need be the third, they will grow bored with dying and all will be as it has been before.”

“We will be coming,” Fralk said. “We will be coming in force. I do not think you will stop us. You may reckon me witstruck, but a year from now the mastery of these lands will be walking on its eyestalks, of that I assure you.”

“Suppose for the sake of talk you are not witstruck,” Reatur said slowly. “Why come to me to announce what you intend? Why not simply fall on me one night when none of the moons is in the sky?”

“Because your domain lies at the eastern edge of the Ervis Gorge,” Fralk said. “We would have you aid us, if you will. We know you have no great love for either of your neighbors.”

“You know that, do you?” As a matter of fact, Reatur thought, Fralk had a point. As far as he was concerned, Dordal was an idiot and Grebur a maniac, and both of them disgraces to the name of domain master. Still-“Why should I like your clanfather Hogram better, or any other Skarmer? Why do you have the arrogance to claim my domain will be your own? I have an eldest, and he an eldest after him. This domain is ours, and has belonged to great clan Omalo since the first bud. Should I tamely yield it to males sprung from a different bud?”

“Yield it tamely and you will stay on as domain master for your natural life. Your sons and grandsons will not suffer, save that all mates henceforward will take no buds from them. Resist, and I will become domain master here as soon as your castle has been melted to water. You and all of yours will die. The choice is yours.”

Fralk sounded very sure of himself, Reatur thought. He thought the Skarmer domains could do what he said they could do. Reatur was convinced of that. Fralk was no clanfather, though; he lacked the years to have learned the difference between what one wishes, even what one is sure of, and what turns out.

“Your choice is no choice,” Reatur said. “Either way, my line fails. I will defend it, as long as I may.”

“Thank you, clanfather,” Ternat said quietly. Then his voice turned savage. “Shall I now deal with this-this clankiller as he deserves?” He moved to put himself between Fralk and the one exit.

The Skarmer envoy went blue again. “The penalty I told you of will fall on you if I come to harm here,” he gabbled.

“From what you say, it will fall anyhow,” Ternat said. “So how are we worse off for punishing your filthy words?”

“Let him go, eldest,” Reatur said. “Shall we make ourselves into hunting undit, as the Skarmer seem to be?” He turned all his eyestalks away from Fralk, denying that the young male deserved to exist. Still speaking to Ternat, the domain master went on. “If ever he shows himself on our side of the gorge again, it will be the worse for him. Now take him out and send him on his way.”

“As you say, clanfather.” That was as close to criticism as Ternat would let himself come. He escorted Fralk out of the little chamber; Reatur still kept his eyes averted from the Skarmer male. Ternat was a good eldest, the domain master thought. Unlike’ so many, he did not stand around waiting for his father to die or, as also happened sometimes, try to speed the process along. A good eldest, Reatur thought again.

The domain master walked slowly back into the great hall.

Ternat soon returned. Some of his hands still had claws out. Reatur guessed that he had not been gentle in escorting Fralk away. He did not blame him for that.

“What now, clanfather?” Ternat asked.

“I don’t know.” The admission made Reatur unhappy. “None of my eyes sees any way the Skarmer could make Fralk’s boasts good. Is it the same with you?”

“Yes. But he would not have been here boasting if they did not have something. War across a Great Gorge…” Ternat’s eyestalks wiggled in disgust.

Reatur felt the same way. Wars against neighboring domains were rarely pushed to extremes. In the end, after all, everyone hereabouts sprang from the first Omalo bud. But the Skarmer would care nothing for that, would be aiming to plant their own buds on the local mates-Fralk, curse him, had come right out and said as much.

“We will have to set a watch on the gorge,” Ternat said.

“Hmm? Oh, yes, eldest.” Lost in gloomy musings, Reatur had almost missed Ternat’s words. The domain master’s wits started moving again. “See to that at once. And I suppose we will have to send word to the rest of the Omalo domains, warning them of what may be happening. And if nothing does, what a laughingstock I’ll be.”

He paused. “I wonder if that isn’t the purpose of this whole affair, to split me off from the rest of the domains and leave me alone vulnerable to the Skarmer.” He hissed. “I dare not take the chance, do I?”

“Clanfather, the answer must come from you.”

Reatur knew his eldest was right. So long as Ternat was in his power, the younger male had, and could have, no responsibility of his own. The domain master’s six arms had to bear that burden alone. “Send the messengers,” he decided. “Better to be ready for a danger that does not come than off our guard to one that does. You tend to it, in my name.”

“In your name, clanfather,” Ternat agreed proudly. He hurried off.

Reatur started to follow, then changed his mind. Instead, he walked down the corridor to the mates’ chambers. As they always did, they cried out with joy when he opened the door; they never failed to be delighted to see him. “Reatur!” they shouted. “Hello, Reatur!… Look what we’re doing!”

“Hello, Lamra, Morna, Peri, Numar,” he said, patting each one of them in turn. He did not stop until he had named and caressed them all; he made a point of remembering their names. Unlike some clanfathers, he treated mates as people, as much as he could. They could not help it that the sardonic saying “as likely as an old mate” meant something that would never happen. They had a directness of their own, a beautiful openness males outgrew too soon.

“Look, Reatur, look what I did!” Numar proudly showed him some scribbles she had made with a soft, crumbly red stone on a piece of cured hide.

“That’s very good,” he said gravely.

“It looks just like Morna,” Numar said.

“It certainly does,” he agreed with a certain amount of relief:

now he would not have to ask what the marks were supposed to be. Numar might have told him, or she might have had a tantrum. He did not feel like coping with a tantrum at the moment. He wanted the mates to be their usual happy selves, to salve his anger and worry after the encounter with Fralk.

The mates were exactly as he wished them to be, and even that did not help. “See how big Biyal’s buds are getting, Reatur,” Lamra exclaimed.

Biyal stepped up to show the domain master the six bulges that ringed her body, one not far above each foot. “I wonder which is the male,” she said.

“So do I,” Reatur said gently.

“I want to have buds,” Lamra said.

“I know you do, Lamra.” In spite of himself, Reatur felt worse instead of better. He knew that Biyal’s buds would break free of her when they were ripe, and that she would die when that happened. She knew it, too, and so did Lamra, but it meant nothing to them. They were too young. That was the one consolation of the life of a mate. Now, to Reatur, it did not seem enough.

“I want to have buds,” Lamra repeated. “Reatur, I want to have buds right now.”

“I know, Lamra.” The domain master let the air hiss out through his breathing pores. “Come here.” She squealed with glee and came. They pressed together. The other mates cheered them on. In a part of his mind, the cheering made Reatur sadder, but the exquisite sensations running through his body pushed the sadness far away.

“Roger, Houston, we are set for coded transmission, as ordered,” Emmett Bragg said. He clicked off the transmitter and looked around the Athena’s cabin. “First codes they’ve sent us since we got here,” he remarked. He sounded casual, but even without weightlessness the words would have hung in the air.

Irv Levitt asked the obvious question. “What are they telling us that they don’t want the Russians to hear about?”

“Secrets.” His wife Sarah spoke the word as if it were obscene. She pointed to Minerva rolling by on the monitor. “That’s the enemy, not the people on Tsiolkovsky. Compared to whatever’s down there, the Russians are our next of kin.”

She sounded absolutely certain. She usually did, her husband thought. A lot of MDs he knew were like that-they needed arrogant confidence to deal with their patients’ problems, and it spilled over into everything else they did.

Bragg only shrugged. “Secret is what they ordered, Sarah. Secret is what they’ll get.” He glanced over at Sarah Levitt; in his quieter way, he was at least as stubborn as she was. His voice, though, stayed mild. “I expect that’s why they handed the mission commander’s chair to somebody like me. I’ve been a soldier a long time-I can take orders, not just give ‘em.”

Irv saw a dark flush rise to Sarah’s cheeks, saw her purse her lips for an angry retort. Before she could get it out, Louise Bragg spoke. “Suppose we see what they sent us before we get ourselves all in an uproar.”

“Sensible,” her husband said. Sarah nodded a moment later, her short, curly brown hair fanning out around her face at the motion.

“Good,” Louise said. She was a large, calm, blond woman, about fifteen years younger than Emmett.

Irv remembered that she was Bragg’s second wife; they had not been married long when the selection process for Athena began. Would Emmett Bragg have dumped his ex and gone after an engineer to help himself get picked? Absolutely, Irv thought. That didn’t mean they didn’t care for each other. Had they not, the ship was too cramped to hide it.

Speed of light to Houston, time to react there, speed of light back. A quarter of an hour went by before the message came in. Bragg transcribed the code groups, one by one, and taped them so he would have a backup. “Roger, Houston, we copy,” he said when the transmission was done.

He unstrapped himself. “Excuse me, folks,” he said, and pushed himself out of the cabin and down the passageway toward his compartment. Irv saw him pull a key from a pocket on his coveralls. The cubicle he shared with Louise, unlike the other two, had a locked drawer.

Louise did not have a key for it. Once she had asked her husband what was in there. He had grinned a lopsided grin and replied, “My girlfriend.” Nobody had asked since. Now they had at least part of the answer.

“I hate having someone else in charge of my fate this way,” Sarah said.

“Now you know how patients feel,” Irv told her. She glanced sharply at him, then gave a rueful nod.

Freefall was relaxing anyhow, after the nausea went away, and Louise Bragg contrived to look almost boneless as she stretched herself in midair. “When there’s nothing to do but wait,” she said, “you might as well be comfortable.”

They waited. After a while, Irv pulled a folding chess set with magnetic pieces out of his hip pocket. He opened it up, then shook his head. Two pawns was too far to be down to Sargon; the computer program was going to clean his clock again. He knew he ought to resign and have another try. He knew he was too stubborn to do it. He tried a knight move, thought better of it, and put the piece back.

lie was still tinkering and not getting anywhere much when he heard Emmett call, “Pat, Frank, come forward for a bit, if you could.”

A moment later, Bragg came gliding into the cabin. He stopped himself on the back of his chair. Within a minute, Pat and Frank Marquard had joined everyone else in the cabin.

“What’s up, Emmett?” Frank asked. He sounded casual, but his expression belied his tone. He and Pat both could tell something was up: Bragg had the veteran officer’s knack for turning ordinary words into an unmistakable order.

The mission commander glanced down at the sheet paper in his hand. He was also holding, Irv saw, a map Minerva compiled from Mariner and Viking photos. “Interesting,” was all he said.

Louise would not let him get by with that. “Come on, Era. Out with it,” she told him. “Suspense isn’t funny.”

“All right,” he said, a little sheepishly. He held up the map.

“We’ve all known since ‘T6 where Viking landed, haven’t we? Here.” He pointed.

“Not far west of the Jotun Canyon, sure,” Irv said. Everyone else nodded.

“Not sure. They’ve just done a pile of new computer work on the Viking data, and it turns out the lander actually came down here, about fifty miles east of where they thought. We’ll have to adjust our landing site to conform to the new data. Louise, honey, it’ll mean more time on the computer for you- sorry.”

“I expect I’ll manage,” she said, which for a minute or so was the only break in the silence that followed her husband’s announcement.

“How very-convenient,” Sarah Levitt said at last. “Now we know, and the Russians don’t.” Both missions had intended to land as close to the Viking touchdown point as possible; only there could they be sure they would find intelligent life.

“There might be anything on the other side of that canyon,” Irv said. Pat Marquard nodded vigorously. He knew they were thinking along the same lines. Minerva’s big canyons were wider and deeper than anything Earth knew; each spring they carried meltwater from the south polar cap to the seas and lakes of the southern tropics-though on Minerva the word “tropics” had a strictly geographic meaning. The great gorges had to be formidable barriers to both ideas and genes.

“I reckon the Russians will tell us, same as we’ll tell them what we come across on our side,” Emmett Bragg said. His drawl had gotten thicker. That happened, Irv had noticed, when Bragg did not want to come out with everything that was on his mind.

“I think we ought to pass the word on to Tsiolkovsky,” Sarah said.

Bragg raised an eyebrow. “If Houston had wanted Tsiolkovsky to know, they wouldn’t have coded the information before they sent it.” He sounded as though that closed the subject for him and expected it to for everyone else.

It didn’t. “Houston is on Earth, umpty-ump million miles from here. The Russians are right here with us,” Sarah said. “Right now, I have more in common with them than with a pack of chairwarmers back in Texas.”

“Really,” Frank Marquard agreed. “Is there intelligent life in Houston?”

“I think they’re right, Emmett,” Irv said. “This is going to be tough enough, even sharing what we have. It’s too big for us not to.” He spoke with some hesitation. He was anything but combative and did not relish the idea of getting into a shouting match when the mission commander blew a fuse.

But Bragg surprised him. Instead of losing his temper, or even pretending to for effect, he looked over at his wife and asked, “Honey, how many coded transmissions has Tsiolkovsky received since we assumed Minerva orbit?”

“Let me see.” She fiddled with the computer. “At least twenty-nine, plus however many they got when we were on the far side of the planet and couldn’t monitor them.”

“How many of those have they shared with us?”

Louise did not have to check that. “Next one will be the first.”

“Oh, but that’s the Russians, though. That’s just the way they“ Pat Marquard stumbled to a halt as she realized where her words were taking her. “-do things,” she finished lamely.

Irv shook his head. Bragg couldn’t have had that turn out better for him if he had planned it for weeks. And now the commander took the advantage, saying, “If you all”-he carefully made it two words-“think I’m not sorry to put some distance between Tsiolkovsky and us, I won’t say you’re wrong. Minerva’s a big place. Why rub elbows with the Russians when we don’t have to?”

“What if we end up needing something they have and we don’t, or the other way round?” Sarah had not given up.

“Canyon or no canyon, we won’t be that far from them,” Bragg said. “If anybody needs anything that bad, he can holler for it.”

“What if we need a ride home?” Sarah asked softly.

Frank Marquard winced; Irv felt himself doing the same thing.

But Bragg said fatly, “Anybody who needs a ride home is dead, unless he can make it on Minerva until another expedition comes along. Athena’s life-support won’t take more than six people home, and neither will Tsiolkovsky’s. For that, folks, we are on our own. We’d all best remember it, too.”

The words hit home. Irv had lived on Athena long enough to have grown used to it, as he would have to, say, an apartment. Being reminded of how fragile a place it was hurt.

But Tsiolkovsky was just as fragile. “So the territory Viking saw was really on the east side of Jotun Canyon, then, not the west?” Irv asked. At Bragg’s nod, the anthropologist went on.

“What is the west side like, then? Are the Russians going to try to fly Tsiolkovsky down into badlands? If they are, I say we call them, and the hell with Houston. I wouldn’t do that to anybody.”

Bragg frowned, but then his face cleared as he thought it over. “That’s fair,” he said. “We’ll find out.” He folded the map and stuck it into a breast pocket of his coveralls. It was not nearly detailed enough to show him what he needed. He pulled the NASA Photographic Atlas of Minerva off a shelf; the Velcro that held the book in place let go with a scratchy sound of protest.

The mission commander riffled through the pages till he found the plate he needed. He held the book open. Five heads craned toward it. “Looks to be flatland and low hills, same as we’ll be landing in. None of the miles and miles of scree and boulders you see around the edges of the polar caps, and no big erosion features. They aren’t taking any worse chances than we are.”

Frank Marquard studied the photo with a professionally appraising glance. When he said, “He’s right,” Irv knew that any chance to overturn Bragg’s decision was gone.

So did his wife. “All fight, Emmett,” Sarah said. “But if they don’t trust us once we’re all down on Minerva, they’ll have reason now.”

“They don’t trust us now,” Bragg answered. “And you know what? I don’t trust them, either. That’s all right. The best way to deal with ‘em is to keep one hand on your wallet. That way you never lose track of where it is.”

Sarah snorted. The Marquards went back to the labs in the rear section of Athena to return to whatever they had been doing. And when Tolmasov called from the Tsiolkovsky, nobody said anything about code groups.

When she and her husband were in the almost privacy of their cubicle, though, Sarah Levitt said, “I still don’t like it, Irv. Not just that we didn’t tell the Russians, but that word about the changed coordinates came through today the way it did. It just seems too pat somehow.”

“I know what you mean,” he said. “That bothers me, too. It’s almost as if Houston’s known all along that the coordinates they gave out to everybody weren’t the right ones, and just decided now to let us in on it.”

He had meant the words as a joke, but once out they had an appalling ring of probability to them. He felt Sarah’s slim frame stiffen. “I wish you hadn’t said that,” she told him. “I don’t- want to believe it.”

“Likely it isn’t true,” he said, though he doubted that himself.

“Give me one good reason why not.” Sarah’s tone said she did not believe he could come up with one.

But he did. “When was the last time the United States was able to hang on to a secret for thirteen years?”

“A point,” she admitted at last. “Not a very consoling one, but a point. You pick the oddest ways to make me feel better.” “Did you have something else in mind?” he asked hopefully. “No,” she said after a small pause. “I’m tired, I’m grouchy, I wouldn’t enjoy it much now, and I don’t think I could make it much fun for you.”

“You’re very annoying when you make sense, you know,” he said. That coaxed a small, almost reluctant laugh from her, but she went to sleep all the same. After a while, so did Irv.

Oleg Lopatin’s face, Tolmasov thought unkindly, was made for frowning. Those eyebrows-the colonel still thought of them as Brezhnev brows, though the Chairman was seven years dead and thoroughly discredited-came down like clouds covering the sun.

“You should have asked the Americans about the coded message,” Lopatin said.

“I did not see how I could, Oleg Borisovich. They have never asked us about any we receive. And besides,” Tolmasov added, unconsciously echoing Emmett Bragg, “I did not think they would tell us. They would have sent it in clear if they did not care whether we heard it.”

“You should have asked them, anyway,” Valery Bryusov said. “Why do you say that, Valery Aleksandrovich?” Tolmasov asked, more sharply than he had intended. The linguist did not usually speak up for Lopatin. If he did, he probably had a good reason. Tolmasov wondered if he had missed something.

Bryusov tugged at his mustache. The gesture had become a habit of his in the months since he had let it grow. It was red-blond with a few white hairs, a startling contrast to the hair on his head, which was about the color of Tolmasov’s.

He tugged again, then said, “We send things in code because it is our habit to send things in code. Even Oleg Borisovich will agree, I think, that it would not matter much if the Americans found out what was in a good many of them.”

Lopatin’s frown got deeper. “I suppose that may be true in a few cases,” he admitted grudgingly. Tolmasov knew it was true. He was a trifle surprised the KGB man did, too. Lopatin went on, “What of it, though?”

“The crew of Athena must know that, too,” Bryusov said, ticking off the point on his finger like the academician he was. “They must have studied us as we studied them. They, though, boast of how open-to say nothing of prodigal-they are with information. If they send in code, then, it must be something unusual and important, and so worth asking about.”

“You may have something at that,” Tolmasov said. “Let me think it over; perhaps next time we talk with Athena I will put the question to Bragg. Heating what he says could be interesting, I suppose.”

“My congratulations, Valery Aleksandrovich,” Shota Rustaveli said. “Even a theologian would be proud of reasoning that convoluted. Here it may even have reached the truth, always an unexpected bonus.”

“Thank you so very much, Shota Mikheilovich,” Bryusov said.

“Always a privilege to assist such a distinguished scholar,” Rustaveli replied, dark eyes twinkling. Bryusov scowled and floated off to find something to do elsewhere. Tolmasov smiled at his retreating back. If he didn’t know better by this time than to get into a duel of ironies with the Georgian biologist, it was nobody’s fault but his own.

“You would talk with the Americans, too, then, Shota Mikheilovich, and try to find out what Houston sent them?” Lopatin asked.

“Oh, not me. They find my English even worse than you do my Russian.” Rustaveli deliberately exaggerated his slight accent. He hung in midair, upside down relative to Lopatin and Tolmasov. It did not seem to bother him at all.

“Will you ever be serious?” Lopatin growled.

“I doubt it.” Whistling, Rustaveli sailed down the corridor after Bryusov.

“Georgians,” Lopatin said softly.

“He’s good at what he does.” Tolmasov meant it as a reproof, but was not sure it came out that way. Down deep, he thought the KGB man had a point. Rustaveli was the only non-Russian on Tsiolkovsky. Everyone else found him indolent and mercurial, very much the stereotypical man of the south. He found them stodgy and did not try to hide it.

“Let us see how well he does in Minervan weather,” Lopatin said. “Him and the Americans both.” He chuckled nastily and mimed a shiver.

Tolmasov nodded. After Smolensk, no. winter held much in the way of terror for him.

But Rustaveli had come back. “About the Americans I do not know, Oleg Borisovich,” he said, exquisitely polite as always, “but I will do well enough. If I should have trouble, perhaps Katerina will keep me warm.”

It was Tolmasov’s turn to frown. Russians credited Georgians with legendary success with women. Shota did nothing to downplay the legend, and even though he and the doctor had quarreled, the way her eyes followed him made Tolmasov wish she looked at him like that. She gave herself to Tolmasov these days, and he was sure she enjoyed what they did together. Still, somehow it was not the same.

“Is your boasting all you want to tell us?” the pilot asked stiffly. “We have more important things to do than listening to it.”

“No, no,. Sergei Konstantinovich.” Rustaveli sounded wounded. “I just wanted to remind you that the odds are it will not matter in the long run whether you talk with Athena or not.”

“And why not?” Tolmasov fought for patience. Maybe, once Rustaveli got the jokes out of his system, he would settle down for a while.

For the moment, the Georgian did not seem to be joking. “Because, very probably, Moscow has the code broken and will send us what it says.”

“Hmm.” Tolmasov and Lopatin looked at each other.

“Something to that,” the KGB man said after a brief hesitation, even here, so many kilometers from home, he wondered who might be listening.

“I am glad you think so, Oleg Borisovich,” Rustaveli said. He lifted a finger, as if suddenly reminded of something. “I almost forgot-Yuri wants to see you.”

“Me? Why?” Lopatin sounded suspicious, but only a little. Yuri Ivanovich Voroshilov spent as much time as he could in his laboratory. The chemist, Tolmasov thought, found things easier to deal with than people. It was quite in character for him to treat Rustaveli as nothing more than a biped carrier pigeon.

Smiling, the Georgian sank his barb. “He’s all out of ice, and wants to borrow your heart for a few minutes.”

“Why, you!” Lopatin grabbed for the buckle of the safety harness that held him in his seat.

Tolmasov brought his hand down on top of the KGB man’s. “No brawling,” he snapped. Lopatin kept struggling for a few seconds to open the harness, then subsided. Tolmasov turned his glare on Rustaveli. “I will log this incident. You are reprimanded. There will be no repetitions.”

“Yes, Comrade Colonel.” Rustaveli clicked his heels, a gesture only ludicrous in freefall. “Reprimand all you like. But it means nothing.”

“You will think differently when you get back to Earth,” Tolmasov ground out. “Are you a mutineer?” He was a military man; he could not think of anything worse to calm Rustaveli.

“No, merely practical,” the biologist answered, quite unruffled. “If we get back to Earth, I will be a Hero of the Soviet Union, reprimand or no. If we don’t, the reprimand certainly will not matter to me. Truly, Sergei Konstantinovich, you should think things through more carefully.”

The colonel gaped at him. The worst of it was that Rustaveli even made a twisted ‘kind of sense.

“There, there,” the Georgian said, seeing his popeyed expression. “To please you, I will even accept the reprimand- provided you also log the KGB man, for mocking my people.”

Lopatin let out a scornful laugh. He knew how likely that was. So did Tolmasov. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the KGB might have been made to answer for misconduct. Too bad Gorbachev had only lasted nine months. Tolmasov still wondered if his cerebral hemorrhage had been of the 5.54mm variety.

“You’ve talked yourself out of your bloody reprimand,” the colonel told Rustaveli. “I hope you’re satisfied. Now go away.” Grinning, the biologist sailed off.

The male shoved Fralk toward the bridge. “Go on,” he said harshly. “Never let us see you on this side again.”

See me you shall, Fralk said, but only to himself. He stepped out onto the cables of the bridge.

“Once you are across, we will cut it,” the male told him. “If you do not hurry, we will not bother to wait.”

Fralk hurried. His toes wrapped around the lower rope; his fingerclaws gripped the upper one. He walked out over empty space. On the eastern side of the gorge, the one he was leaving, the males of Reatur’s clan grew smaller.

The western side, though, the lands of the Skarmer clans, did not seem any closer. Even down close to its bottom, the gorge was too wide to yield him sight of progress so soon. And with one wall visibly receding while the other appeared fixed in place, Fralk had the eerie feeling that the canyon was stretching itself like a live thing as he traveled, that he might never reach the far side.

The wind whistled around, above, below. Over the heart of the gorge, Fralk let an eyestalk turn downward, and another up. The other four, as usual, looked all about. Only the thin lines of the rope bridge, extending in the direction he had come and toward his destination, gave his vision a clue he was not a mote suspended in the center of infinite space.

The sensation was so daunting that he stopped, forgetting the male’s threat. If the gorge were infinitely wide, how could movement matter? He looked down and down and down, to the boulders far, far below. For a giddy moment, he thought they were calling to him. If he let go of the ropes, for how long would he fall?

‘That reminded him he might indeed fall, regardless of whether he let go. The Omalo males would know how long someone took to cross the bridge and surely would allow him no excess time, not when they knew he and his wanted to supplant them. Telling that to Reatur had perhaps been less than wise. But then, Fralk had reckoned there was a fair chance the domain master would yield. How little folk on one side of a gorge understood those on the other!

Fralk hurried onward. Every tremor of the bridge in the wind set him to quivering with fright, thinking he was about to be pitched into the abyss.

At last the far side of the gorge began to appear closer, while the one from which he had come seemed frozen and distant in space: the reverse of the stretching he had nervously imagined before. The males he could see were his own solid Skarmer budmates, not scrawny easterners.

They helped pull him off the bridge and clustered around him. “What word, eldest of eldest?” called Niress, the commander of the crossing.

Fralk gave it to him: “War.” A moment later, as if to underscore it, the bridge jerked like a male who had just touched a stunbush. Then, like that same imaginary male a moment later, it went limp and hung down into the gorge. Fralk feared its stone supports would give way now that it was not attached to anything on the far side, but they held.

Niress’s eyestalks wriggled with mirth. “As if cutting the bridge will stop us,” he said. He and Fralk began the long climb up to the top of the gorge.

The red numbers on the digital readout spun silently down to zero. “Initiate separation sequence,” Emmett Bragg said.

“Initiating.” His wife flipped a toggle.

Strapped in his seat, Irv Levitt heard distant metallic bangs and rattles different from the ones he no longer consciously noticed. After a while, Louise said, “Separation sequence complete.”

We’re on our own, Irv thought. As if to emphasize the point, Athena’s monitor gave him an image of the rocket motor package that had accompanied the ship to Minerva. While he watched, the motors slowly grew smaller as they drifted away. They would wait in orbit while the hypersonic transport that was Athena proper went down to the planet and-if everything worked exactly right-returned to rejoin them for the trip back to Earth.

He glanced over at his wife, whose seat was next to his in the cabin. Sarah’s answering smile was forced. “Just another flight to a new research lab,” he said, trying to cheer her by coming out with the most ridiculous thing he could think of.

“I hate them all,” she said. “I don’t like being in any situation where I don’t have full control of things, and I can’t do that in an airliner-or here,” she added pointedly. “Once we’re down, I’ll be all right.”

He nodded. A lot of doctors he knew felt that way, some of them much more than Sarah. That was, he supposed, why so many of them flew their own planes. He smiled. Sarah would get her chance at that.

Athena:

“Thank you, Sergei Konstantinovich,” Bragg said. “The same to you and Tsiolkovsky. Give our regards to Comrade Reguspatoff.”

“To whom?” Puzzlement crept into the Russian colonel’s precise voice.

“Nichevo, “Bragg replied. “It doesn’t matter.”

“As you wish,” Tolmasov said: an oral shrug. “We will see you on the ground, then. We also are about to uncouple.”

“Expected as much,” Bragg said. “We’ll both be busy for a while, so I’ll say goodbye now. Athena out.” He cut the transmission.

“Reguspatoff?” Frank Marquard asked. He made a good straight man.

“Registered-U.S. Patent Office,” Bragg explained with a grin that looked more like a wolf’s lolling-tongued laugh than any gentler mirth. “Or do you think Tsiolkovsky looks so much like Athena just by accident?”

“It’s bigger,” Frank said. “Why don’t we copy their rockets?”

“I wish we would,” Bragg said. “Well, we do what we can with what we’ve got. Not too bad, I suppose: we’ll be down ahead of them.”

His wife broke in. “Or maybe we won’t. Radar shows two images from Tsiolkovsky. I’d say that means they have uncoupled from their engine pack.”

The mission commander’s head jerked toward the screen. “Son of a bitch,” he said softly. He picked up the mike, punched the Transmit button, and started speaking Russian. “Athena to Tsiolkovsky.”

“Tsiolkovsky here: Lopatin.” The engineer’s English was accented but easy to follow.

“Tell your boss he’s a sandbagging bastard.”

“Sandbagging? I do not understand this word,” Lopatin said:

Bragg had left it in his own language. A moment later, Colonel Tolmasov came on. He sounded like a man fighting laughter. “I do, Emmett. That is uncultured.” “You should talk.”

“You will excuse me if I lack time for casual conversation, Brigadier. We are, as you said, rather busy at the moment. Tsiolkovsky out.”

The radio crackled to life. “Tolmasov here. Good luck, Athena.”

“Thank you, Sergei Konstantinovich,” Bragg said. “The same to you and Tsiolkovsky. Give our regards to Comrade Reguspatoff.”

“To whom?” Puzzlement crept into the Russian colonel’s precise voice.

“Nichevo,” Bragg replied. “It doesn’t matter.”

“As you wish,” Tolmasov said: an oral shrug. “We will see you on the ground, then. We also are about to uncouple.”

“Expected as much,” Bragg said. “We’ll both be busy for a while, so I’ll say goodbye now. Athena out.” He cut the transmission.

“Reguspatoff?” Frank Marquard asked. He made a good straight man.

“Registered-U.S. Patent Office,” Bragg explained with a grin that looked more like a wolf’s lolling-tongued laugh than any gentler mirth. “Or do you think Tsiolkovsky looks so much like Athena just by accident?”

“It’s bigger,” Frank said. “Why don’t we copy their rockets?”

“I wish we would,” Bragg said. “Well, we do what we can with what we’ve got. Not too bad, I suppose: we’ll be down ahead of them.”

His wife broke in. “Or maybe we won’t. Radar shows two images from Tsiolkovsky. I’d say that means they have uncoupled from their engine pack.”

The mission commander’s head jerked toward the screen. “Son of a bitch,” he said softly. He picked up the mike, punched the TRANSMIT button, and started speaking Russian. “Athena to Tsiolkovsky.”

“Tsiolkovsky here: Lopatin.” The engineer’s English was accented but easy to follow.

“Tell your boss he’s a sandbagging bastard.”

“Sandbagging? I do not understand this word,” Lopatin said:

Bragg had left it in his own language. A moment later, Colonel Tolmasov came on. He sounded like a man fighting laughter. “I do, Emmett. That is uncultured.” “You should talk.”

“You will excuse me if I lack time for casual conversation, Brigadier. We are, as you said, rather busy at the moment. Tsiolkovsky out.”

“Temperature is up a little,” Louise said. “We’re starting to get into the atmosphere.”

Her husband glanced at the gauge, then at the radar altimeter. “Still well inside specs. The carbon-fiber matrix can take more than shuttle tiles, and having a machine with a skin all in one piece means we don’t need to worry about spending our Minerva time gluing those little suckers back into place.”

Now there, Irv thought, was a really alarming notion.

A thin whistle began to fill the cabin and rose toward a shriek.

“I thought by now I knew every noise Athena could make,” Pat Marquard said nervously.

“It isn’t Athena,” Frank answered. “It’s Minerva-the wind of our passage.” His voice held awe. Irv understood why. No one but they-and half a dozen Russians, some unknown number of miles away-had heard the wind of another world.

His wife thought of something else. “I wonder what the Minervans will make of our noise coming down.”

“When the shuttles landed at Edwards, we’d hear the boom in L.A.,” Pat said. “And that’s without the noise from the ramjet and turbojet sections of our motor.”

Emmett Bragg chuckled. “They’ll be hiding under their beds, if they have beds. And speaking of ramjets-“ He checked the altimeter again and Athena’s velocity. “We’re low enough and slow enough to fire it up and save our liquid oxygen for the trip back up. I’m shutting down the lox pump, Louise.”

“Acknowledged,” she said. A moment later, she added, “First time I ever heard Mach six called slow.”

“Next to what we’ve been doing, honey, it’s just a mosey in the park.”

Irv sided with Louise. Mach six was no mosey, so far as he was concerned. Despite aggressive soundproofing, the noise was up, too. The pump was no longer thumping and clacking away, but the shriek of Minervan air coming in through the ramjet inlet more than made up for that. It reminded Irv of a dentist’s drill the size of Baltimore. His teeth cringed at the very idea.

His seat was padded and contoured, but he still felt as though he weighed tons. “Are we really sure Minerva’s gravity is only a couple of percent higher than ours?” he asked plaintively. “Or are we still decelerating?”

“Yes, we’re sure and yes, we are,” Emmett replied, but before Irv had a chance to be relieved, the mission commander went on. “But not enough to do anything about our weight.” He sounded amused.

Irv groaned. So did Frank.

Sarah felt strong enough to raise an arm and point to the monitor. “We just passed something big. A castle, a temple, a barracks-”

“Could be anything,” Irv agreed. “I wish we knew more about where the Minervans are technologically. They don’t have atomic energy and they don’t have radio, but there’s a lot of difference between where we were in 2000 8.c. and in 1890.”

“Or in 22,000 B.C.,” Emmett put in. He enjoyed sticking pins in people to make them jump.

This time it didn’t work. Irv had the facts to shoot him down. “No big buildings in 22,000 B.C.,” he said smugly. Then he shut up as another what-ever-it-was went by on the screen. Clouds blurred the view, but he still recognized the pattern on the ground surrounding the building. “Those are fields down there!”

“You’re right,” Pat said. “You see those grooved circles in the middle of nowhere when you fly over irrigated farms in desert country.”

“But the lines-plow marks, would those be, Irv?” Sarah said.

“On Earth, sure. Here, who knows?” he answered.

“The lines aren’t straight,” she observed. “What does that mean?”

“Maybe contour plowing. Maybe the Minervans don’t know what straight lines are. That’s what we’re here to find out.”

Emmett said, “Yeah!” as Athena flew over a pair of volcanoes with glaciers snaking down from their peaks. “Those are Smaug and Ancalagon,” he added. “Now I know where we are. We need to head just a touch further east.” He made the adjustment.

They flew lower and lower, slower and slower. As they dropped below 45,000 feet and Mach one, Emmett cut in the turbines. The engines went from a shriek to a full-throated roar. “This is your pilot speaking,” Bragg said. “Thank you for flying Minerva Air. The cabin attendants will be starting the movie shortly. Please keep your seat belts fastened.”

“Athena does sound just like a T4T now, doesn’t she?” Irv said; the mission commander’s deadpan, dead perfect delivery made him realize consciously what he had been feeling in his bones. Not even a first-class seat on a big jet, though, had the padding and room this one did. On the other hand, airline passengers didn’t need so much, either.

“How’s she handle, Emmett?” Frank asked. He had flownlight planes before he went into astronaut training, and T38 jet trainers since. If anything happened to Bragg, he would try to get Athena home. Neither he nor anyone else relished the prospect.

Bragg thought for a moment before he answered. “Depends on what you’re comparing it to. It’s no fighter, but it’s a long way from being a mildly aerodynamic brick like the shuttle, too.”

“More like fun, or more like work?” Marquard persisted. “In space it’s fun. Here it’s work, but not pick-and-shovel work. White collar, you might say. I’m not really dressed for it.” Grinning, he ran his hand down the front of the blue NASA coverall.

“Where’s Tsiolkovsky?” Pat asked.

Louise Bragg checked the radar. “Well west of us, and a couple of miles higher.”

Everyone in the cabin whooped-none of them wanted the Russians to beat them down. “In Baikonur our name is cursed, when they find out we landed first!” Irv sang, mangling Tom Lehrer in a good cause.

“I wonder what they think of our bearing,” Louise said.

“Why aren’t they calling to ask us about it?”

“They figure we screwed up,” her husband guessed. “Tolmasov’s just gonna let us. Sitting in his chair, I’d do the exact same thing.”

Sarah was still watching the monitor. She gasped. “Will you look at that?” Other gasps followed shortly.

Irv had seen plenty of pictures of Jotun Canyon taken from space. He had flown over the Grand Canyon half a dozen times. Neither did anything to prepare him for what he was seeing. Jotun Canyon was a great gouge on the face of the world. Three miles deep, a dozen miles across, even at jet speeds it took a minute and a half to cross.

“That’s my spot,” Frank declared. “Just start me at the edge, give me plenty of rope, and let me work my way down. If Jotun doesn’t cut through a billion and a half years of stratigraphy, I’ll eat my hat.”

Bragg flew Athena south along the eastern rim of the canyon. “We swing inland when it jogs southwest,” he said. “Then we start looking for a place to set down.” He laughed a couple of syllables’ worth of laugh. “After the shuttle, that looking-around time is a luxury.”

They were down very low now, low enough to see individual trees-if those tall, dark green, stationary things were trees-in the forests. Snow clung to them, though summer was about to start.

The canyon changed direction. Bragg flew Athena away fromit. In a couple of minutes, he flew over some little rolling hills. Seeing them made Irv sit up, even against gravity’s new and unpleasant grip. He was not the only one who recognized them. “That’s where Viking set down!” Pat exclaimed.

“Sure does look that way,” Bragg agreed. He flew on. Before long, he flew over another one of the large buildings and the fields that surrounded it. “Hate to rip a half mile track in a fellow’s crop,” he said, “but I don’t think we’re gonna do any better. Anybody really want to try talking me out of it?”

Irv thought about it, but in the end he didn’t. Athena, he hoped, would be strange enough-and big enough-to win the humans the benefit of the doubt. Nobody else said anything, either.

“All right,” Bragg said. “I’m gonna do it. Let’s go around for one more pass to kill some speed and get nice and lined up, and then we land.”

Athena was so close to the ground that on the monitor Irv saw things moving around down there. Things… He felt the hair on his arms and the back of his neck tingle as the realization hit him. Those were not things. Those were Minervans.

“Altitude 500 feet, speed 320,” Louise said as her husband swung Athena down. “Three hundred feet, speed 300… 200 feet, speed 290.”

“Arming the landing gear,” Emmett said. He lifted the switch’s cover, pushed it to the oN position.

Louise’s reading never paused. “A hundred fifty feet, speed 260…”

“Deploying landing gear.” Emmett uncovered and pushed the switch next to the one he had just hit. Athena really seemed a plane to Irv now; the noises and bumps as the wheels came down were the same as the ones he knew from Delta jets.

“Ninety feet, speed 240…”

“Landing gear down and locked.” Bragg hesitated, then bared his teeth in what was almost a smile. “We owe the Russians this one-the undercarriage is borrowed from the Ilyushin IIT6. There’s no better big plane in the world for getting in and out of unpaved fields.”

“Fifty feet, speed 230… 20 feet, speed 220…”

There was a jar. “Down! Hot damn, we’re down!” Bragg said exultantly. “Wheels locked,” he added a moment later. He reached out with his left hand and slammed the speed brake all the way forward.

“I hope you have something more historic than, ‘Hot damn, we’re down!’ planned for when we step outside,” Sarah remarked as they bounced along the ground.

“Did I say that?” Bragg sounded amazed.

So was Irv, at how gentle the landing was. He had experienced bumpier ones at Dulles. “Let’s hear it for Russian undercarriages,” he said.

They rolled to a stop. Pat was looking at an instrument cluster that had not had much to do since it was installed. “Temperature 39 degrees, humidity 48 percent, wind out of the south at… six knots. A lovely almost-summer day,” she finished. “If you’re an ice cube,” Irv said.

Emmett Bragg was on the radio. “Houston, this is Athena. We contacted the surface of Minerva at 2:46:35 P.M. Landing extremely nominal. Baby, it’s cold outside. Athena out.”

He got up and walked back to a panel just aft of the cabin. He might have been on parade; he conceded nothing to so many months of freefall. Irv watched admiringly. Soon enough, he would have to start walking, too. He was in no hurry about it.

Like the meteorology package, the panel Bragg opened had not been important while Athena was in space. Now it was. The mission commander started taking out parkas, snow pants, boots, headgear…, and pistols and ammunition pouches.

“Just in case,” he said, holding them up. “Time to go meet the natives.”

The scream in the sky faded a little-enough to let Reatur hear other screams in the castle. The mates and newbudded males were making an unholy racket. So were a good many adults. Reatur did not blame them. Were he without a domain master’s dignity to uphold, he would have screamed himself.

The first thud had slapped against the walls like a boulder of ice. When everything jumped, Reatur’s first thought was, quake! He took an instinctive step toward the doorway, while his eyestalks sprang upward to see if the roof was going to come down on him.

But only that one jolt came. “Funny kind of quake,” he said out loud. He started to go on about his business, but then the roar started. Fear of a quake, at least, was a familiar kind of fear. The bellow overhead kept getting louder and shriller, until came out of its belly. “There was something worse to be” said after all. Enoph said it. “It’s going to come down in our fields!”

Reatur had never seen legs like the monster’s. They ended in clumps of fat, black, round things like no claws or sucker pads or hooves the domain master knew. The deliberate way the legs descended from its belly was new to him, too…, or was it? The arm that had come out of the strange thing had moved rather like that. Were they related?

He did not think the monster would be easy to kill as the strange thing had been. Too bad.

Dust and crops and a little drifted snow flew as the monster’s legs touched the ground. Behind it, crops withered, as if it voided raw heat. Perhaps it did; even from some distance away, Reatur felt a lick of warm air as it went by the castle.

The monster moved ever more slowly. At last, not far from the edge of the cleared land, it came to a stop. The noise died. Reatur waited for the monster to notice him and his males-or at least his castle, the only thing nearby of a size to compare to it-and to approach. But it did nothing of the kind. It stayed where it was, as if waiting for him to come to it.

The domain master wanted to run, to hide. He saw, though, that while half the eyestalks of his males were turned on the monster, the other half pointed toward him. These were his sons and sons of sons and sons of sons of sons. They were under his power and would be as long as he lived. A third son of a fifth son of a fourth son might dream of becoming clanfather and taking a clanfather’s power one day and be safe in the dreaming, knowing it would never turn true. But Reatur knew he was as much in his males’ power as they in his. What he wanted meant nothing here. He knew what he had to do.

“Let’s go see what the cursed thing is,” he said. He hefted his spear and started walking toward the-the thing, he told himself firmly. If he did not think of it as a monster, maybe it would turn out not to be one.

Pride flowed all the way out to the tips of his fingerclaws when he saw how many of his males followed him. Against an ordinary foe-even against the Skarmer males, curse them, if Fralk was not a liar since the moment he was budded-

Reatur would have expected to find all his males coming after him. Here, though, he found he could not blame the few who hung back.

He muttered angrily as he came to the track of destruction the mon-no, the thing-had left behind. Its round feet made grooved tracks that pressed the ground down. How much did it weigh, to do that?

He looked at shriveled, sagging plant stems and muttered again. How much of his crop had he lost? Why did the monster have to choose him? Why not the Skarmer, who really deserved a monster’s attention? Thinking of it as a thing was not working. He gave up.

“Shall I make a cast at it, clanfather?” a very young male asked.

“As long as it’s content to just sit there, I’m willing to let it,” Reatur said dryly. “What if you made it roar again?” He quivered at the very idea. At such close range, the noise would probably tear his eyestalks off. The youngster, who did not seem to have thought of that, lowered his spear in a hurry.

“Surround it,” Reatur said. His males moved to obey. Unfortunately, they reminded him of so many little runnerpests trying to surround a nosver male. The monster’s round feet alone were taller than any of his people.

Its size was not the only curious-no, more than curious, alien-thing about it. Every animal Reatur had ever seen was arranged the same way males and mates were, with limbs and appendages spaced evenly all around its body. The monster was different. Its front end was nothing like its back; the only pieces that matched each other were the ones that would have resulted from its being split down the middle lengthwise.

And even that limited symmetry was not absolute, for on the far side of the creature Ternat shouted, “Clanfather, a mouth is opening!” A moment later, the domain master’s eldest amended, “No, it’s doorway! Beasts are coming out of it!” Reatur saw no such doorway on his side.

“On my way!” he yelled back. Greatly daring, he ran under the monster’s belly. If it stooped, he would only be a smear on the ground, and Ternat the new domain master. It did not stoop.

Breathing hard, Reatur emerged from its shadow. Only Enoph and a couple more of the bolder males had followed him. More were taking the long way around the monster. As with those who had stayed back by the castle, Reatur did not blame them. Only when he was back in the sunlight did he let himself think on what a fool he had been.

Fortunately, he had no time to brood about it. Ternat and other males were pointing with eyestalks, arms, and weapons. came out of its belly. There was something worse to be said, after all. Enoph said it: “It’s going to come down in our fields!”

Reatur had never seen legs like the monster’s. They ended in clumps of fat, black, round things like no claws or sucker pads or hooves the domain master knew. The deliberate way the legs descended from its belly was new to him, too…, or was it? The arm that had come out of the strange thing had moved rather like that. Were they related?

He did not think the monster would be easy to kill as the strange thing had been. Too bad.

Dust and crops and a little drifted snow flew as the monster’s legs touched the ground. Behind it, crops withered, as if it voided raw heat. Perhaps it did; even from some distance away, Reatur felt a lick of warm air as it went by the castle.

The monster moved ever more slowly. At last, not far from the edge of the cleared land, it came to a stop. The noise died. Reatur waited for the monster to notice him and his males-or at least his castle, the 0nly thing nearby of a size to compare to it-and to approach. But it did nothing of the kind. It stayed where it was, as if waiting for him to come to it.

The domain master wanted to run, to hide. He saw, though, that while half the eyestalks of his males were turned on the monster, the other half pointed toward him. These were his sons and sons of sons and sons of sons of sons. They were under his power and would be as long as he lived. A third son of a fifth son of a fourth son might dream of becoming clanfather and taking a clanfather’s power one day and be safe in the dreaming, knowing it would never turn true. But Reatur knew he was as much in his males’ power as they in his. What he wanted meant nothing here. He knew what he had to do.

“Let’s go see what the cursed thing is,” he said. He hefted his spear and started walking toward the-the thing, he told himself firmly. If he did not think of it as a monster, maybe it would turn out not to be one.

Pride flowed all the way out to the tips of his fingerclaws when he saw how many of his males followed him. Against an ordinary foe-even against the Skarmer males, curse them, if Fralk was not a liar since the moment he was budded-

Reatur would have expected to find all his males coming after him. Here, though, he found he could not blame the few who hung back.

He muttered angrily as he came to the track of destruction the mon-no, the thing-had left behind. Its round feet made grooved tracks that pressed the ground down. How much did it weigh, to do that?

He looked at shriveled, sagging plant stems and muttered again. How much of his crop had he lost? Why did the monster have to choose him? Why not the Skarmer, who really deserved a monster’s attention? Thinking of it as a thing was not working. He gave up.

“Shall I make a cast at it, clanfather?” a very young male asked.

“As long as it’s content to just sit there, I’m willing to let it,” Reatur said dryly. “What if you made it roar again?” He quivered at the very idea. At such close range, the noise would probably tear his eyestalks off. The youngster, who did not seem to have thought of that, lowered his spear in a hurry.

“Surround it,” Reatur said. His males moved to obey. Unfortunately, they reminded him of so many little runnerpests trying to surround a nosver male. The monster’s round feet alone were taller than any of his people, Its size was not the only curious-no, more than curious, alien-thing about it. Every animal Reatur had ever seen was arranged the same way males and mates were, with limbs and appendages spaced evenly all around its body. The monster was different. Its front end was nothing like its back; the only pieces that matched each other were the ones that would have resulted from its being split down the middle lengthwise.

And even that limited symmetry was not absolute, for on the far side of the creature Ternat shouted, “Clanfather, a mouth is opening!” A moment later, the domain master’s eldest amended, “No, it’s doorway! Beasts are coming out of it!” Reatur saw no such doorway on his side.

“On my way!” he yelled back. Greatly daring, he ran under the monster’s belly. If it stooped, he would only be a smear on the ground, and Ternat the new domain master. It did not stoop.

Breathing hard, Reatur emerged from its shadow. Only Enoph and a couple more of the bolder males had followed him. More were taking the long way around the monster. As with those who had stayed back by the castle, Reatur did not blame them. Only when he was back in the sunlight did he let himself think on what a fool he had been.

Fortunately, he had no time to brood about it. Ternat and other males were pointing with eyestalks, arms, and weapons.

“There, clanfather! Do you see them?” Ternat cried. “Aren’t they the oddest things you ever looked at?”

“They certainly are,” the domain master agreed absently. He was too busy stating at the weird creatures to think much about what he said. The things were a mottled green and brown, all but one part of their-heads? Those were pinkish and had eyes that looked amazingly like people’s eyes, except that they were not on stalks.

One of the creatures turned so Reatur could see the other side of its head. It had no eyes there. It only had two arms, too, now that he had seen all the way around it, and, like its fellows, only two absurdly long legs. How, he wondered, did the things keep from falling over?.

“Smoke is coming out of them!” shouted the young male who had wanted to spear the giant monster out of which these smaller beasts had come. The worst of it was, the youngster was right. Smoke streamed from the openings just below the creatures’ alarming eyes.

The young male waved his spear. One of the creatures reached for something it carded near where that ridiculous pair of legs joined his body. It held the thing in a paw-no, not a paw, Reatur saw; a hand, even if it had too many fingers. And the thing that hand was holding, whatever it was, was no random stone or chunk of ice; it had the purposeful shape of something made to carry out a specific task. Which meant, or could mean-

“Don’t throw that spear!” Reatur shouted. Half an eighteen males had been ready to hurl their spears-the creatures walking on the monster made far more tempting targets than that huge thing itself. At the domain master’s cry, they all guiltily lowered their weapons, each sure that Reatur had shouted at him alone. “I think they’re people,” Reatur went on.

Had he not been clanfather, he was sure the males would have hooted him down. As it was, they respected his rank, but he knew they did not believe him. Even Ternat, who had a mind with more arms than most, said, “They’re too ugly to be people.”

“Ugly?” That had not even occurred to Reatur. The creatures were as far outside his criteria for judging such matters as was the strange thing back at the castle. “They aren’t ugly. Fralk, now, he’s ugly.” That got eyestalks wiggling with mirth and brought the males back toward his way of thinking. “These things, they’re just-different.”

Up above him, the creatures were making noise of their own. Some had voices that sounded much like his; others used deeper, more rumbling tones. None of their babble sounded like any language he knew, but it did not sound like animal noises, either.

“Quiet!” Reatur said. The crowd of excited males obeyed slowly. When at last silence settled, the domain master turned four of his eyes on the creatures above him. “I don’t want any trouble with you,” he told them, pointing first at himself and then at them. To emphasize his words, he set his spear on the ground.

As he had hoped, his speaking when the rest of the males were quiet drew the strange creatures’ attention to him. They turned their eyes his way-which brought on another thought: was that the only direction in which they could see? He decided to worry about it later-it was just one more weirdness among so many. Meanwhile, the creature that was holding the what-ever-it-was put it back in the pouch where it had come from. Reatur chose to take that as a good sign.

The creature held up an arm. Reatur did the same. The creature stuck up one finger. Reatur did the same. “One,” he said. The creatures rumbled a reply. Reatur tried to imitate the noise it made, then said, “One,” again. This time, the creature came out with a rather blurry version of the same word.

“You were fight, clanfather,” Ternat said. “They are people or they aren’t animals, anyway.”

“No, they aren’t,” Reatur said. “This reminds me of the language lessons we go through whenever a traveler comes from so far away he hasn’t picked up trade talk.”

The domain master returned his attention to the creature above him. He hoped the byplay with his eldest had not distracted the thing. Evidently not-it was getting something out of an opening in its mottled hide; something flat and square. The side Reatur could see was plain white.

The creature came to the edge of the monster’s back. It looked down at Reatur, then surprised him(as if anything about it were anything but a surprise!)by bending its legs and stooping. It reached down, holding the flat square out to him.

“Be careful, clanfather. It might be dangerous,” Ternat said. “Thank you for worrying,” Reatur said. He held up an arm just the same. A goodly gap remained between his fingerclaws and the creature’s hand. He waved in invitation, urging it to come down to join him and his males. He wondered if it understood and wondered what it meant by shaking its head back and forth.

Refusal, evidently; it did not come down. But it did let the flat square fall. The square thing flipped over and over in the air. Reatur saw that its other side was not just white. There was some kind of design on it, but the thing was turning too fast for him to tell what. He grabbed for it and missed. It fell to the ground. Naturally, it landed with the plain white side on top. He widened so that he could pick it up.

He turned it over-and almost dropped it in amazement. “The strange thing!” he exclaimed, holding it up so more males could see. It was a picture of the thing he had killed, the thing he and his males had dragged with so much labor back to the castle.

And what a picture! He had never imagined an artist could draw with such detail. With new respect, he used two eyes to look up at the creatures still standing on the monster, while he used two more to keep examining that incredible image. The creatures had more abilities than monster-riding, it seemed.

They were watching him, too. They were so peculiar, he realized, that they might not understand that he rec6gnized the strange thing. He pointed at that unbelievable picture, at himself, back to the castle, and at the picture again.

By their reaction, they understood that. They yelled, leapt about, and hugged one another so tightly Reatur wondered if they were coupling. Then he laughed at himself for his foolishness. They were all about the same size, so they surely were all males. That made sense, he thought. Mates, by their nature, were not travelers.

Travelers… His thoughts abruptly turned practical. Travelers traveled for a reason. If these-people, he made himself think-were wandering artists, he wondered how much they would want for a portrait of him. No harm trying to find out.

Tolmasov clicked off the radio with a snarl of frustrated rage. “Not first,” he growled. “That damned uncultured old American son of a pig beat us down.” Despair lay on him, heavy as gravity.

“They may have been first, Sergei Konstantinovich, but we were better,” Valery Bryusov said, trying to console him. “They are eighty kilometers east of where they should be, and across the chasm from us. They will not have an easy time returning.”

Tolmasov only grunted.

He looked through the window. Seeing out only by way of monitors was one thing for which he emphatically did not envy Athena. Television, to him, was not quite real. It could lie so easily that even the truth became untrustworthy. Glass, now, a man could trust, streaks, smears, and all.

To the eye, the country reminded him of the Siberian tundra where Tsiolkovsky’s crew had trained. It was gently rolling land, with patches of snow here and there. From a distance, the plants looked like plants; Tolmasov was no botanist. Some were dark green, some brown, some yellow.

He did not see anything moving. He had set Tsiolkovsky down well away from the buildings he saw in the landing approach. It was not that he wanted to, or could, keep the landing secret-as well keep sunrise hidden! But if the Minervans came to him, he would have an easier time meeting them on his terms.

He got out of his seat and walked over to the closet full of warm clothes. “What’s the temperature outside, Katerina Fyodorovna?” he asked.

She checked the thermometer. “One above.”

“Brr!” Shota Rustaveli gave a theatrical shiver. The five Russians, even quiet Voroshilov, laughed at him. A degree above freezing-that was weather to be enjoyed, not endured, Tolmasov thought.

“It is early afternoon, at a season that is the equivalent of May, in a southern latitude that corresponds to Havana’s,” Dr. Zakharova pointed out, and Tolmasov felt his mirth slip. Russian summer was brief, but it was there. On Minerva, the weather did not get a whole lot warmer than this.

“Thank you for coming to my defense, Katerina, in these bleak circumstances,” Rustaveli said. The doctor murmured something. So did Tolmasov, under his breath. Where had the Georgian learned to sound like a courtier from some perfumed court and, worse, to do it so well.’?

The colonel drew calf length felt valenki over his feet and put his arms through the sleeves of his quilted telogreika. The rest of the crew, except for Lopatin and Voroshilov, crowded around to do likewise.

Next to the jackets, boots, and prosaic thermal underwear hung six full-length sable coats, for bad weather. Bryusov ran a loving hand down one of them. “Here is something the Americans cannot match,” he said.

“And here is something else,” Oleg Lopatin added. He had opened a locked cabinet not far from the protective gear. He started passing out weapons and brown plastic magazines.

Tolmasov took his gratefully. Even though it was the new model AKT4 with small caliber, high velocity ammunition and not the AK4T he had trained with, a Kalashnikov was a Kalashnikov: a good friend to have if the going got rough.

“How long shall we wait for the natives to come to us before we start looking for them?” Rustaveli asked as all of them but Lopatin and Voroshilov stood in front of the airlock. Doctrine was two people on Tsiolkovsky at all times, one of them able to fly the ship, and Lopatin was backup pilot.

They went through the lock two by two, Tolmasov and Bryusov first. The pilot stood on Tsiolkovsky’s left wing and stared out at a world not his own. The view was broader than the one from the windows, but not much different-boring, barren, superficially familiar terrain. A thrill ran through the colonel all the same. He had been in his teens when Buzz Aldrin had first set foot on the moon. Well, Aldrin was envying him today.

The lock’s outer door came open behind him. Katerina and Rustaveli emerged and looked around. The Georgian tugged his jacket tighter around him. Tolmasov smiled to himself.

Rustaveli was carrying a chainlink ladder. He fixed it to brackets on the edge of the wing and let it unroll. The other end landed on the ground with a metallic whump. The biologist cocked an eyebrow at Tolmasov. “I suppose you’d shoot me if I tried to go down ahead of you.”

“I would try not to hit anything vital,” Tolmasov said. Rustaveli laughed, bowed, and stood aside with a sweeping gesture of invitation. Tolmasov slung his rifle, stood, and started down the ladder. He was glad he had managed to keep his tone light. The way his hands had tightened on the rifle at Rustaveli’s impudent suggestion made him know he was only half joking.

The ground felt like ground under his feet. He took a few steps away from the ship and away from the shadow of the wing. He glanced up at the sun. Did it seem too small in the sky? Hard to tell, the more so as he had got used to its shrinking as Tsiolkovsky traveled outward. He was sure though, that nowhere on Earth was the sky-or what he could see of it through patchy clouds-quite this shade of greenish blue.

The ladder rattled and clanked. Katerina Zakharova lowered herself down onto the Minervan surface. She took two heavy, deliberate steps, then looked at her footprints. “Humanity’s marks on a new world,” she murmured.

“Ah, but the other question is, what marks will it leave on us?” Shota Rustaveli came next. Tolmasov would have bet on that. If Bryusov had tried preceding the Georgian, the linguist likely would have arrived on Minerva headfirst.

A moment later, Bryusov did join the other three. He looked ill at ease and soon revealed why. “I am not of much use here, until we actually meet the Minervans.”

That left him wide open to a sardonic retort from Rustaveli, but, rather to Tolmasov’s surprise, it did not come. Instead, just as Lopatin shouted in his earphone, he heard the biologist say quietly, “I do not think you will be useless long, Valery Aleksandrovich.”

Rustaveli was pointing; Tolmasov’s eyes followed his finger. A Minervan had been hiding behind a stone big enough to make Tolmasov glad Tsiolkovsky’s undercarriage missed it. Now the native came out, moving slowly toward the waiting humans.

It looked like its picture. That should not have surprised Tolmasov, but somehow it did. What he did next was as hard as anything else in his life. He stepped aside, saying, “Valery Aleksandrovich, now I am not of much use. You and Shota Mikheilovich must go forward from here.”

“The man who covers is as useful as the one who advances,” Rustaveli said. Hearing an army phrase from him caught Tolmasov off guard. So did finding out the Georgian meant it literally; Rustaveli set down his Kalashnikov before he walked away from Tsiolkovsky to meet the Minervan. After a moment’s hesitation, so did Bryusov.

The colonel automatically shuffled a few steps sideways, so his companions would not be between him and the Minervan. He turned his head to tell Katerina to do the same thing, but she already had.

She nodded at him. “You see, I was listening after all through those endless drills,” she said. He dipped his head in acknowledgment.

Their gloved hands open and empty before them, Bryusov and Rustaveli stopped a couple of meters in front of the Minervan. It kept two eyes on each of them, while its remaining pair refused to hold still on any target, even Tsiolkovsky, for more than a couple of seconds at a time. The spectacle was unsettling. Tolmasov wondered how the creature kept from tying its eyestalks in knots.

Bryusov pointed to himself. “Valery.” He pointed to Rustaveli. “Shota.” He pointed to the Minervan and waited. For this, Tolmasov thought, we need a linguist?

It might have been simple, but it worked. The native pointed toward itself with three arms at once and said, “Fralk.” Its voice startled Tolmasov again-it was a smooth contralto. To his way of thinking, nothing taller than he was, and unbelievably weird looking to boot, had any business sounding like a woman, a sexy woman, at that.

Get used to surprises, the colonel told himself. Expect them. After all, you were just reminding yourself this is a whole different world. He wondered how many times he would end up giving himself that order. A great many, he guessed.

Bryusov was still talking at the Minervan, trying to pick up nouns. The tape recorder in his pocket would save the replies he got for more study later. Tolmasov chuckled to himself. The recorder was just as good as the Americans’. Both expeditions used Sonys.

While the linguist worked, Rustaveli walked halfway around Fralk so he could take some pictures of it-him? her? and Bryusov. But when he pulled out his camera-also Japanese, again like the Americans’-the Minervan sprang away from him and Bryusov. Its body got short and plump, so its arms could reach the ground. A moment later it was tall again, and it was holding stones in three hands.

“Hold still!” Katerina shouted, startling Tolmasov and the Minervan both. A couple of Fralk’s eyestalks whipped toward her. The native did not put down the rocks it had seized, but it made no move to throw them, either.

At the same time Fralk was watching Katerina, it was also keeping an eye on Bryusov, another on Rustaveli, and one more on Tolmasov. A Minervan, the colonel realized, was a creature that had no behind, any direction was as accessible to it as another. He wondered how the natives chose which way to go.

Worry about that some other time, he told himself firmly. First things first. “I think the photographs will have to wait, Shota Mikheilovich,” he called. “At least until this Fralk understands that your camera is no weapon.”

The biologist’s thin, mobile features twisted in a grimace, but he lowered the camera, moving slowly and ostentatiously. The eyestalk Fralk was using to watch him followed the motion. The Georgian signed. “You appear to be right,” he said mournfully. “I will go turn over some flat stones. With luck, nothing I find under them will want to slay me for taking its picture.”

Seeing Rustaveli go off to do something that had nothing to do with it seemed to reassure Fralk. It staged giving long answers to Bryusov. It talked, in fact, at such length that the linguist threw his hands in the air. “This will be wonderful later, when I and the computers back at Moscow have a chance to analyze it,” he said plaintively, “but for now it’s only so much nonsense.”

He had picked up a couple of rocks of his own, a small white one and a larger gray one. He held the white rock above the gray one, then below it. “Spatial relationships,” he explained to Tolmasov, then turned back to Fralk, who was saying something or other.

Eventually, the colonel thought, he would have to learn Minervan. He ought to be just getting fluent in it when Tsiolkovsky lifted off. Then he likely would never use it again. Things worked that way sometimes.

The thought he had had before occurred to him again. “How are you going to learn the native words for ‘front’ and ‘back,’ Valery Aleksandrovich? This Fralk doesn’t have either one.”

For a moment, Bryusov looked scornful, as he did whenever anyone presumed to comment about his specialty. Then he must have realized he had no impressively crushing rejoinder handy. He tugged at his mustache. “A very good question, Sergei Konstantinovich,” he admitted.

The alarm rang in the headsets of the crewfolk on the ground. Oleg Lopatin’s voice followed it. “A large party of Minervans heading this way out of the northeast. They appear to be armed.”

“Then we should have the one here on good terms with us, to speak well of us to its companions,” Rustaveli said. He reached into a jacket pocket. The motion made Fralk turn an eye from Bryusov to him. The biologist pulled out a pocket knife and opened its blade. Fralk hefted the rocks it was holding.

“You are not endearing yourself to the native, Shota,” Katerina remarked.

That had comebacks obvious even to Tolmasov, but Rustaveli was, for once, pure business. “Hush,” was all he said. He bent, set the knife on the ground, and stepped back from it. Then he pointed to it and to Fralk and waved an invitation to the Minervan. “Go ahead; it’s yours,” he said, though Fralk could not hope to understand his words.

The gestures got through, though. Fralk moved toward the knife, hesitantly at first but then with more confidence as Rustaveli and Bryusov backed farther away to show that it was all right. The Minervan grew short and wide and picked up the knife-by the handle, Tolmasov saw, which meant it knew what a knife was. Well, Lopatin had as much as said that.

Yes, Fralk knew what a knife was, It held the blade in one hand and tested it with the fingers of another. It must have approved of what it found. It pointed to the knife, then to itself, and made a noise that Tolmasov mentally translated as, “For me.’?”

Rustaveli must have read it the same way. “Da, da,” he said. When he did not try to take away the pocket knife, Fralk must have gotten the idea.

Tolmasov heard faint contralto cries in the distance. The Minervans sounded angry. His face quirked into a smile, almost against his will. Angry Minervans sounded like angry sexy women-an unexpected perk of the job. The American slang threatened to make his smile wider. He forced himself to seriousness.

Katerina also heard the locals approaching. She took cover behind one of Tsiolkovsky’s huge tires. That made such good sense that Tolmasov crouched behind another one.

He watched the Minervans approach. They were within a couple of hundred meters now, carrying spears and stones and other things less easy to identify. The Kalashnikovs could make bloody hash of them-and of the Soviet mission. If the Americans made peaceful contact while he got into a firefight…, he shuddered. He would not end up a Hero of the Soviet Union when he got home. He would end up begging for a bullet, more likely.

Bryusov did not seem to have noticed the-army? gang? posse? He gestured vehemently, like a man in the grip of an overpowering itch. Maybe he was getting through to Fralk, though; the native had three eyes on him, for whatever that was worth.

“I suggest you come to the point, Valery.” Shota Rustaveli was on his belly on the cold ground, behind a stone that would give him some cover. He knew the Minervans were coming. So did Fralk, who kept an eye on them.

Evidently Bryusov did come to the point. Fralk hurried out toward its-countrymen? Probably, Tolmasov thought. If they were enemies, it would have run the other way.

Fralk shouted something. The onrushing Minervans came to a ragged halt. A couple of natives emerged from the crowd and hurried up to Fralk. They made themselves short and wide, then resumed their usual shape. If Bryusov had gone through contortions before, they were not a patch on the ones Fralk put on now. Of course, having six arms and eyestalks gave it an unfair advantage there.

One of the natives who had approached Fralk said something. Fralk broke in loudly. The other native went short and wide again. “That must be a token of submission, like a salute or a bow,” Bryusov called.

Fralk shouted to the whole group of Minervans. They set their weapons on the ground. “Valery!” Fralk called in that thrilling voice.

The linguist had put down his rifle when he started trying to communicate with Fralk. “Cover me,” he called to his companions, and walked, empty-handed, toward the Minervans. Fralk widened himself as the human came up. In delighted reply, Bryusov bowed from the waist.

That set the Minervans off again. “They’re not used to anything that can bend that way,” Katerina guessed.

“No,” Tolmasov agreed. He knew he sounded absentminded, and he did not care. The relief washing through him was too great for that. First contact was made, and made without bloodshed. History books-maybe history books on two worlds, he thought, blinking-would not bear his name as a curse.

No one with a lot of arms would try to ram a spear through his brisket, either, which also counted. He stood up, stepped out from behind Tsiolkovsky’s immense tires, and let the Minervans see him. He left his rifle at his side but did not put it down. Not yet.

“For me?” Hogram tested the knife blade with a fingerclaw and, like Fralk before him, was amazed at its keenness. “A most generous gift, eldest of eldest.”

“Gift?” Fralk held his eyestalks very still, the picture of innocence. “How can such a thing be a gift, when all the clan possesses is in the clanfather’s keeping?”

Hogram turned a second eye on the young male, who wondered if he had laid the flattery on too thick. Maybe he had. “There is a difference, you know,” Hogram said, “between being in my keeping and being in my hand.” But the domain master’s eyestalks twitched; he was more mused than anything else.

Fralk did not take another chance. He changed the subject, at least to some degree, saying, “These-strangers-may be valuable to us, clanfather.” “Strangers” seemed a better word than “monsters,” especially as he was trying to speak well of them.

“If they have more knives such as this, certainly,” Hogram said. “Or, better yet, if they can make them with longer blades. Those would help us when we cross the Great Gorge. I would pay well for them.”

“Of course, clanfather,” Fralk agreed. “The trouble is finding what the strange males want. They are so-different-from us that much of what we find valuable may be of no interest to them.”

Hogram’s eyestalks were more than twitching now; they were wiggling with mirth. “That is the trouble with any trade, eldest of eldest, finding out what the other male wants and what it’s worth to him.” The clanfather’s faded, sagging skin and the continual wheezing of his breathing pores showed that he would never be young again, but with his years had come shrewdness. Clan Hogram prospered, even among the Skarmer clans, where a trading blunder could put a clan up to its eyestalks in trouble.

Fralk had learned a great deal, just watching and listening to his grandfather. Now to apply some of that learning, if he could… “Clanfather, have you chosen a male yet to work with the strangers, learn their peculiar words, and teach them ours?”

“Why, no.” Hogram sounded a bit taken aback.

Good, Fralk thought. The domain master had not had a chance to work through all the implications of the strangers’ arrival, while he himself had thought about little else since the skybox(no, the skyboat,. he amended, consciously using the Lanuam word the Skarmers had borrowed, almost fell on top of him.

“Surely it would be better to have a single male handle such matters than to scatter them piecemeal among several,” he said.

“So it would, so it would.” Hogram’s fingers twiddled as he thought. “You see to it, if you care to, Fralk. You’ve been dealing with the creatures since they came here, so you know more about them than anyone else.” The domain master paused. “I’ve given you two hard tasks together now, first dealing with the Omalo domain master and now with these strangers. You are still a young male. If you decline here, I will not think less of you.”

“I will try, clanfather.” Fralk did his best to put a doubtful tremor in his voice, but had all he could do to keep from dancing with glee. If he was the channel through which the strangers dealt with clan Hogram, some of what went by would stick to him, just as debris littered the sides and bottom of Ervis Gorge after the summer floods passed. He suspected the strangers had things much more interesting than the little knife. No trader with even the tiniest sense gave away his best stock as an opening present.

And Hogram, the young male vowed to himself, would not see everything the strangers had to offer. Some Fralk would keep or dispose of for himself. Though clanfathers’ rights were as strong in theory among the Skarmer clans as with the Omalo across the gorge, in practice a male still under his clanfather’s power could also accumulate a limited amount of wealth for himself. Or even, Fralk thought, not such a limited amount, so long as he was careful.

His musing made him miss something Hogram had said. “Your pardon, clanfather,” he said, widening himself contritely.

“I wonder where these strangers-creatures-whatever they are-come from,” Hogram repeated. “We’ve not seen nor heard of nor smelled their like.” His arms waved in agitation. “Imagine not having eyestalks, being blind to half the world all the time. Imagine having only two legs, and two hands. Imagine wanting to stay so hot-”

“That is unnerving,” Fralk agreed. The strangers had a device with fire somehow trapped inside it and had used it on the journey to the castle when night came. They huddled around it, though the evening was mild. The heat had been so savage that no one wanted to go near them, not even Fralk, who was curious about the fire. He knew of few things that burned readily; a new one would find a ready market among icesmiths and also could be useful in war. When he got more words, he would ask about that.

“They follow strange gods, too, if what you and the others have told me of them is true,” Hogram went on. “I’ve never heard of anyone worshiping the Twinstar.”

“They do, clanfather,” Fralk insisted. “They roused a little before dawn this morning, as did we, and through clouds low in the east they spied the Twinstar, the bright blue one and its little faint companion. As we watched them, they pointed to it, to themselves, and to it again. I cannot think of any reason for such a rite as that but worship.”

“For all we know of them, they may have been trying to tell us they’re. from the Twinstar,” Hogram said. “They’re weird enough.”

Fralk’s eyestalks started to twitch. Then he noticed that Hogram was not laughing. He thought about it. It made as much sense as anything else, he supposed. He said so. He was still thoughtful when he left the domain master’s presence a little while later. He was reminded he would have to be even more cautious in his dealings with the strangers than he had thought. Taking Hogram for a fool would never do.

“I hope they don’t mind us watching as their young get born,” Pat Marquard said as she walked along behind Reatur.

“So do I,” Irv said. “From the way they keep their females so restricted, I’m afraid they might. But I hope Reatur will see we’re so different from his kind that we don’t count.”

Though he had gloves on, he kept his hands in his pockets. He noticed himself doing that whenever he was inside Reatur’s castle. Just the idea of being in a building made largely of ice gave him goose bumps. He glanced over at his wife. She was doing the same thing.

“Do you think it’s being so restricted that makes the females here nothing like the males?” Sarah asked him.

“More likely just a universal constant,” he said, which earned him a glare from his wife, a snort from Pat, and, at the noise, the brief honor of a second eyeball on him from Reatur. If it was an honor, he thought, and not simply a reflex.

He wasn’t really sure about that. After two and a half weeks on Minerva, he wasn’t really sure about much. Back on Earth, the people to whom Athena’s crew relayed data all sounded certain they knew what was going on. Irv would have had more confidence in them if the advice they sent agreed with itself more than two times in five. As it was, he was looking forward to the day when the Earth slipped behind the sun. Being out of radio contact for a while was beginning to seem a delightful prospect.

Reatur brought him back to the here-and-now by opening the door to the females’ part of the castle. As always, the din that came from the other side of the door when the females saw him was impressive. “Reserved” was not in the Minervan female vocabulary.

The din redoubled when the females spotted the three humans behind the-baron? chief? Irv still had no sure feel for the best rendering of Reatur’s title. One of the few things Minervan he did have a feel for was what the local females thought about humans.

They thought humans were hilarious.

They came crowding around, staring, falling over one another, prodding, poking, pulling their arms back in amazement every time they directly touched warm human flesh, then reaching out to do it again. “They’re like a bunch of berserk puppies,” Pat said as the wave washed over her. She was smiling; it was hard not to smile around Minervan females.

Irv jerked his head back, just in time to keep a female’s fingerclaw from poking him in the eye. The female reached up and ran the finger under the top of his cap instead, then let out an almost supersonic squeal.

“Reminds me even more of my two-year-old niece,” Irv said. The thought saddened him; Beth was three now, not two, and would be five when Irv got back to Earth. She probably would not remember Sarah or him.

“They are like toddlers, aren’t they?” Sarah said slowly.

“Not the one named Biyal,” Pat said. Sarah and Irv both had to nod. No toddler on Earth could have been so dramatically gravid as Biyal. The bulges above her legs made her instantly recognizable to the humans, where even with Reatur they had to pause and consider before they were sure who he was. Those bulges also made her move very slowly, so she was the last female to come out and see the humans. “Hello, Biyal,” Irv said, waving.

“Hello, Irv,” she answered, and waved back with three arms at once. Except for that, both words and gesture were eerily accurate echoes of what the anthropologist had said and done. Such a gift for mimicry was something young children often displayed; Irv thought his wife might have put a finger on an important truth.

Biyal was still wading through the crowd of females toward the humans when she suddenly stopped. “Reatur!” she called, and followed the chieftain’s name with a stream of what was still gibberish despite nearly sleepless efforts on the part of everyone from Athena.

Reatur and the females understood, though; they all turned an extra eyestalk or two toward Biyal. The tippling motion reminded Irv of a wind blowing through a forest of snakes.

Reatur shouted something at the females between him and Biyal. They moved out of the way, clearing a path for him to go to her. The humans followed him.

Sarah’s hand tightened on Irv’s arm. “Look!” she said. “The skin over that bud has split vertically! Reatur timed it well-she must be right on the point of giving birth!” Irv saw that his wife was right. Excitement ran through him. Learning how Minervans were born surely would give him clues to other aspects of their culture, to say nothing of the importance the knowledge held for Sarah and Pat.

Reatur seemed like any other concerned father-to-be. He took two of Biyal’s hands in his own and helped her waddle backward toward the passage out of which she had come. The other females did not go with them. Instead they called out Biyal’s name and one of the few Minervan words Irv was certain he understood: “Goodbye!”

“Do we go on?” Pat whispered to Irv. “I want to.”

“Let’s,” he said after a moment’s thought. “If Reatur or Biyal don’t want us along, they’ll let us know about it.” His first thought was that they would get far enough along behind Reatur’s back that the chieftain would let them continue instead of sending them away. But of course Reatur had no back to be behind. With eyes all around, he saw the humans’ first steps after him.

He hesitated, then used one arm to wave them on. This time Sarah and Pat both gave Irv a squeeze. “You were right,” Pat said, her blue eyes glowing.

Reatur led Biyal into a small chamber. It was crowded when the humans also came in. There was no place to sit down except the floor; Minervans were not built for sitting. All the humans stayed on their feet. Their boots were much better insulated than the seats of their pants.

Biyal reached out with a fingerclaw, scraped some ice from a wall, and reached up to put it into her mouth. Reatur got her more. He gently touched her while she crunched it up.

“He takes good care of her,” Sarah said approvingly. She studied Biyal. “She doesn’t seem to be in much distress, does she?” Sarah laughed at herself. “Of course, I have no idea whether she’s supposed to be. It would be nice if she weren’t, wouldn’t it?”

Pat moved around as best she could in the cramped space, taking picture after picture. Biyal pointed at the camera. “Noise? What?” she asked. Females always spoke more simply than males, Irv had noted; Biyal simplified still more to get her meaning across to humans.

“Autowinder,” Pat said: not an explanation, but at least a name to give to the thing that whirred. Reatur, by now, was used to the noise. Then Pat spoke to Irv and Sarah. “The splits in her skin above each bud are getting longer.”

“Six babies born all at once?” Irv shook his head. “My cousin and her husband have two little kids, a couple of years apart, and they’re ragged.” Remembering the chaos at Victoria’s house made him have trouble thinking like an anthropologist. Finally he managed, musing, “An enormous extended family like the one Reatur has here must make things a lot easier.”

“Splits are longer still,” Sarah said. “If things go on at this rate, either those babies will be born very soon or Biyal’s going to fall apart in so many segments like an orange. And she’s perfectly happy, too. When we send the data back to Earth, I think a lot of women are going to be jealous.”

The splits were growing wider, as well as longer. Minervans, Irv saw, were born feet first. Six young, each with six legs, plus Biyal’s six… Irv began figuring out how many legs that was, and found himself thinking of the man with the wives and the cats and the rats, all on their way to St. Ives. Adding in arms and then eyestalks as they appeared only brought the nursery puzzle more strongly to mind.

“They’re connected to their mother by their mouths,” Pat observed. “Very neat; they get their nourishment directly from her, and never had to evolve anything fancy like a placenta.”

“I wonder how they do dispose of their wastes, though,” Sarah said.

“There.” Pat pointed. “See those little tubes around the central mouth, the ones linking mother and infant? I’ll bet they have something to do with it. Six of them, of course. That seems to be the pattern here.”

“Yes,” Sarah said. She sounded curious, eager to find out what would happen next, trying to guess along. “How do you suppose the babies are going to separate from Biyal, Pat?”

“I don’t know, but I think we’ll find out pretty soon. Look- the ring of little tubes has already come free. She’s bleeding a little from where they went into her, do you see? Minervan blood is browner than ours, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Sarah said again. She leaned forward for a better look.

Irv was watching Reatur watch Biyal. When the bleeding began, the male stepped closer to her. He reached out to pat her on the side, then said something to her. Irv thought he heard the word “Goodbye” again. He touched his pocket. The tape recorder would tell him for sure.

“Here we go,” Sarah said. “Look, Pat-you can see the muscles loosening around the babies’ mouths. Must be some sort of sphincter ring there-”

“Yes, like marsupial babies’ mouths have, to keep them attached to the teat when they’re in their mother’s pouch,” Pat broke in. “Here, though, I’d say the babies will just let go and fall plop on the floor.”

The babies let go and fell plop on the floor.

Biyal’s blood spurted after them, six streams of it, one from each inch-and-a-half wide circle where a baby had been attached. With so much being lost so fast, the streams quickly diminished. Less than a minute after she had given birth, Biyal’s arms and eyestalks went limp and flaccid. She swayed and started to topple.

“Goodbye,” Reatur said; this time Irv was certain he recognized the word. The male eased Biyal down, making sure she would not fall on any of the newborn Minervans.

“She’s dead.” Pat’s voice was shocked, indignant.

“She certainly is,” Sarah agreed grimly. She lifted one foot.

Minervan blood dripped from her boot; it was all over the ground. “Judging by this, I’ll say giving birth for a Minervan is just about the same as getting both carotids cut would be for one of US.”

“This can’t be normal,” Pat protested. “Something must have gone wrong-”

“No,” Irv said before his wife could answer. She glanced at him sharply, but he went on. “This must be what always happens. Look at Reatur. He knew exactly what to expect. He’s seen it before. He may not be happy about it, but he’s going on about his business.”

Reatur was doing just that. He was rounding up the six new little Minervans, which scurried about on the floor. Active as they were, they reminded Irv more of newly hatched lizards or turtles than of newborn human infants. Reatur caught them and picked them up, one after another. Finally he had three in one hand, two in another, and the last separately in a hand on the other side of his body.

“Why apart?” Irv asked him, pointing at the last baby; Reatur had carefully transferred it away from the others, as if he wanted to keep special track of it.

“Male,” Reatur said. He held up the other struggling, squealing infants. “Females.” He said something else that Irv didn’t quite catch. The anthropologist spread his hands, a gesture of confusion Reatur had learned. The-baron paused to think for a moment, then lifted the females to show they were what he meant, saying, “Goodbye fast, like-“ He used a free hand to point to Biyal’s still, dead body.

“That’s all females do here?” Sarah’s back was stiff with horror and outrage. “Get pregnant and then die? But they’re intelligent beings, too, and could be as much as the males, if, if-“ She could not get it out.

“If they lived longer,” Irv finished for her. She nodded, her head down; she would not look at him, or at Reatur.

“Biologically, it makes a certain amount of sense,” Pat said reluctantly. “They reproduce, then get out of the way for the next generation.”

“But who takes care of the babies?” Sarah said.

Pat watched them squirm in Reatur’s grip. “They look like they’re pretty much able to take care of themselves. If they can find their own food-and I’ll bet they can-”

“Then males could nurture as well as females,” Irv broke in. “Or maybe they leave the females in here with their own kind, knowing, uh, knowing they’ll not last long, and take the one male out to train him up to be part of the bigger society.”

“That’s disgusting,” Sarah said. She still was not looking his way.

“I didn’t say I liked it.” Something else occurred to Irv, with force enough that he whacked himself in the forehead with a gloved hand. “We’d better be careful about how we let Reatur and the rest of the natives learn that we aren’t all males ourselves.”

At that, Sarah looked at him, and Pat, too. “We’d better leave,” his wife said in a tight, overcontrolled voice. “If I start laughing, I don’t think I’ll be able to stop.”

Irv waited until one of Reatur’s eyes found him. Then he bowed and said, “Goodbye,” in the local language. Using the word after what he had just watched sent a chill through him that had nothing to do with the icy air in the room.

“Goodbye,” Reatur said. Irv tried to read emotion in his voice and failed. In Reatur’s grip, the babies made noise. Reatur paid no attention to it, so Irv supposed it was the kind of noise baby Minervans were supposed to make.

“Come on,” the anthropologist said. The three humans left the females’ chambers through the room where most of Reatur’s-spouses? again Irv found himself stuck for a word-were still amusing themselves.

The females came crowding round, as full of curiosity as before. Irv was glad he could neither understand nor answer their questions.

Outside Reatur’s castle stood three all-terrain bicycles. They could go places a four-wheeled vehicle could not, and six of them weighed a lot less than a rover would have. “I’m going back to the ship,” Pat said, climbing aboard hers. “I want to get these pictures developed.”

“I just want to get away and think for a while,” Sarah said. She pedaled down the curved track that ran through Reatur’s fields. Her breath streamed out behind her like a frosty scarf.

Irv hesitated. “Which way are you heading?” Pat asked.

“Want to ride along with me?”

“I think I’d better see to Sarah.”

“She’ll be all right.”

“I know. Even so, though-“ He left the words hanging and started after his wife.

“Ah, well, see you later, then,” Pat called to his retreating back. When he did not answer, she slowly rode off toward Athena.

“I didn’t understand that, Valery Aleksandrovich,” Tolmasov said. “Ask Fralk to say it again.” “He said-“ Bryusov began.

The colonel raised a hand. “I thought you understood it. I want to make sure I do, too, and if you translate for me all the time, how can I?” Having decided to learn Minervan, Tolmasov was throwing himself into the project with his usual dogged persistence.

“Again, please,” Bryusov said in the best Minervan he could muster.

“Slowly,” Tolmasov added. That was one word he had used often enough to feel confident about it.

“You give me-“ Fralk pointed to the hatchets, hammers, and other tools the Russians had brought for trade goods. “Some l give Hogram, he-“ The word that followed was unfamiliar to Tolmasov. He looked at Bryusov.

“Trade, I think,” the linguist said doubtfully. “Maybe context will make it clearer.” He turned back to Fralk. “Go on.”

“Hogram, he-“ That word again. “Then he use what he get to get you things. Some things you give me, I not give Hogram. I”-and again-“them myself. Some of what I get for them, I keep and save. Some I use to get other things; them, to get more things. Some I use to get you things you want.”

“Not ‘trade,’ “Tolmasov exclaimed. “I know what that word means-it means sell. Fralk will sell some of what he gets from us, use some of the profits to acquire more goods, whether from us or his own people, and invest the rest.” The colonel rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “What does that make him?”

“A capitalist,” Bryusov said in a small voice.

“Just what I was thinking.” Tolmasov looked at Fralk, not altogether happily. As an alien, the Minervan could be studied for his own sake, without preconceptions. Thinking of him as a capitalist brought in a whole load of ideology. The colonel suddenly laughed out loud.

“What?” Bryusov said.

“He would look very strange, driving a large American car.” “So he would.” Bryusov permitted himself a smile, but it was a nervous one. “Moscow will not find it funny,” he warned. “I doubt Oleg Borisovich will, either.”

“There is that,” Tolmasov said. Still, he wanted to be there when Lopatin got the news, just to see his expression.

Fralk made a noise that sounded amazingly like a woman clearing her throat when the two men with whom she is at dinner have spent too much time talking about their jobs and not enough with her. Tolmasov shook his head at the irony of that marvelous voice being wasted on an alien, and, the Russians had learned, a male alien at that. The colonel bowed to Fralk in polite apology for his woolgathering.

The Minervan widened himself in turn. “Want more-“ He pointed at the hatchets and hammers again, and also at a box of little battery-powered lamps.

“Shall we give him more of the axes?” Bryusov asked.

“Well, why not? We brought them to trade, and the local tools and books and specimens we get in return will be worth a lot more than their weight in diamonds back on Earth. Still, I suppose you have a point, Valery.” Tolmasov tried to use his tiny Minervan vocabulary. “These-“ He pointed to the hatchets himself. “What you do with? Use for?” “Use on Omalo.”

Tolmasov took a certain small pride in noticing Fralk had chosen a preposition different from the one he had used. The object of the preposition, though, remained obscure. “Omalo? Omalo is what?” he asked.

Fralk said something. “Ervis Gorge” was all the colonel understood: the local name for Jotun Canyon. He turned to Bryusov. “Did you follow that?”

The linguist frowned. “The Omalo are something across Ervis Gorge.”

Tolmasov frowned, too. That was better than he had done, but not enough to tell him much. “Again please, slowly,” he said to Fralk.

The Minervan pointed to himself. “Skarmer,” he said. He pointed to the castle where his king? grandfather? relived, the castle that was much the biggest building in this settlement. “Hogram Skarmer.”

“A surname?” Tolmasov asked.

“We’ve seen no signs of such yet,” Valery Bryusov answered. “And while he might use an ax on Hogram, he would not use one on himself. Besides, let him go on-I don’t believe he’s finished.”

The linguist was right. Seeing he had not yet made his point, Fralk said, “Ervis Gorge-this side-Skarmer-all.” He waved his six arms to emphasize his words. “Ervis Gorge-across-Omalo.”

“Borezmoi,” Tolmasov said softly. He was afraid he did understand that. “Valery, I think he’s trying to tell us these Omalo on the other side of the canyon are another whole country. I think we should think three times before we go arming these folk for war.”

“I think also, Sergei Konstantinovich, that we should consult with Moscow,” Bryusov said.

The colonel made a sour face. Bryusov wanted to consult with Moscow to decide which pair of socks to put on in the morning. Then, reluctantly, Tolmasov nodded. “I am afraid you are right. The Americans, after all, are also on the other side of Jotun Canyon. War against them, even by proxy, would not be well received back home, I suspect. We came too close to falling off the big cliff, the nuclear cliff, in Lebanon.”

“We need to learn more of the situation here as well,” Bryusov said.

“So we do.” They could not hope to learn enough, either, Tolmasov thought, not in the limited time they had on Minerva. In the end, they might act anyway. People did things like that.

“Shall we tell the Americans?” Bryusov asked.

“We’ll let Moscow worry about that, too,” Tolmasov decided. “If it were my choice, though, I’d say no, at least not yet.”

Reatur finished cleaning the chamber where the new budlings had burst into the world. It was somber work. That was one of the reasons he did not give it to the mates. The other, of course, was simply that, being as they were, they would have done a bad job of it.

He dragged Biyal’s corpse out of the room, toward the door that kept the mates in their own part of the castle. The evening was growing dark, and he hoped the mates would be back in the little rooms where they slept.

Seventeen evenings out of eighteen, they would have been. Even tonight, most of them were. But Numar and Lamra were still chasing each other up and down the hall. They came to a stumbling stop when they saw the domain master and his burden.

“It’s Biyal,” Numar said.

“How sad,” Lamra echoed. But she did not sound full of grief, no more than if she were speaking of a broken pot or, at most, a dead animal she did not care much about one way or the other. She was too young to grasp that Biyal’s fate awaited her as well. As if to underscore that, she said, “Feel me, Reatur. I think I’m going to bud.”

Reatur ran fingers along her body. Sure enough, the barest beginnings of bulges were there. “I think you are, too, Lamra,” he said, as gently as he could.

“Good,” Lamra said. No, Reatur thought, she did not understand the connection between buds and death that so abridged mates’ lives. Sadness pressed on him. Lamra was a mate he cared for more than he had for any in years. She was more uniquely herself than most mates ever got to be in their limited spans. He would miss her when her time came. Maybe, he thought, a minstrel would be visiting the domain then, and he could pay the fellow for a song by which to remember her.

While he was musing, Numar was getting bored and annoyed that no one was paying attention to her anymore. She poked Lamra with three arms at once, then raced off down the hail. Letting out a squawk loud enough to wake half the mates who were sleeping, Lamra dashed after her.

Reatur got Biyal out of the mates’ quarters and barred the door behind him. He was taking the corpse to the fields when he almost ran into Enoph, who was on his way back from the humans’ flying house. More questions, Reatur supposed; the humans asked more questions and poked their eyes-even without eyestalks-into more places than any people the domain master had ever known. If they had not been so spectacularly strange looking, he would have suspected them of being Skarner spies.

Enoph peered through the gloom. When he recognized what Reatur was dragging after him, he asked, “Would you like me to take care of that for you, clanfather?”

“Eh? No, thank you, Enoph. Mates get all too little in life; I try to give them what I can, and to honor them as I can after they die, as well.”

Enoph opened and closed a hand in agreement. “Yes, I think you act rightly, clanfather. I have two mates in my booth, and treat them as well as I can. For one thing, they’re more fun to be with that way than when you don’t try to train them and just leave them like animals.”

“I certainly think so,” Reatur said.

“Are the budlings well?” Enoph asked.

“The male is large, and seems sturdy. So do the five mates, come to that.” Reatur let air sigh through his breathing pores. “Time will tell.” So many budlings died young. If a male lasted five years, he might well live a long life… if. Many mate budlings never lived to receive buds themselves. And those who did, no matter how strong and healthy they were, had only Biyal’s fate to look forward to.

“How many males is it for you now?” Enoph asked.

Reatur had to count on his fingers and was not quite sure even when he had finished. “I think this puts me within three of filling my fourth eighteen,” he said at last.

“A goodly sum,” Enoph said. In the gathering darkness, Reatur could hardly see the younger male’s eyestalks. “I’ve had four myself, only one still alive. The mates budded with them have not done well, either.”

It was Reatur’s turn to open and close his hand. “Few who aren’t domain masters have the food to spare to keep many mates alive even to budding age,” he said sympathetically. “I daresay we’d run short of them if they didn’t come five to our one.”

“Something to that.” Enoph widened himself. “I’ve kept you long enough from what you came out here for, clanfather. I’ll leave you to it now.” He started back toward the castle’s outwalls.

Reatur let him go, though he had been glad enough of the interruption. Saying farewell to a mate was not a task he approached eagerly. He dragged Biyal’s corpse to a part of the field where the humans’ flying house had seared the crops. Scavengers, he knew, would make off with most of it, but the rest would decay and give fresh value to the soil.

Farther north, he had heard, were folk who, at least in summer, dug holes in the ground as resting places for their dead. That was practical there, where the ground unfroze to a depth greater than a male’s height and stayed soft half the year. In Reatur’s domain, and those around him, burial was more trouble than it was worth.

He murmured a prayer, asking the gods to grant Biyal the long life she had not been able to enjoy here. He added a brief petition for the budlings’ health, then widened himself in a last gesture of respect for their mother.

He was just returning to his full height when two of his eyes were suddenly blinded by a brilliant flash of violet light. He almost jumped out of his skin. Glaring afterimages filled those eyes even after he shut them, as if on a rare clear day he had looked straight at the sun.

Before he had the sense to tell himself not to, he had turned another eyestalk in the direction of the flash. He saw a human pointing something at him. “I might have known,” he muttered. A moment later, the flash went off again, putting that third eye out of commission. “Enough!” he shouted.

“What?” It was one of the humans with a voice that sounded like a person’s-the small one, Reatur thought, though without several humans together it was harder to be sure.

He noticed that the afterimages were fading from the first two eyes that had been flashed and opened them again. Yes, they could see. He was relieved to find he was not blind for good through a third-no, half-of his field of vision. Blind as a human, he thought, and through his annoyance knew a moment’s pity for the strange creatures.

“What is that thing?” he asked, walking toward the human and pointing at whatever he was holding. The domain master spoke slowly and repeated himself several times.

“Reatur?” The human put the question-ending on his name. “Who else?” he said. For the first time, it occurred to him to wonder whether real people looked as strange to humans as humans did to real people. He pointed again and asked again, “What is that thing?”

The human-yes, he decided, it was the male called Sarah- finally understood. “Camera,” he said in his own language, then “picture-maker” in the Omalo tongue.

“Ah,” Reatur said. He had no idea of how the humans’ picture-making gadgets worked, but he admired what they did. Some of them would spit out pictures right away, pictures as marvelously detailed and accurate as the one of the strange thing the humans had shown him just after their house fell from the sky. Reatur had an image of himself, one of Ternat, and another of his castle; the humans, to his surprise, had not even charged him for them.

“Why the big light?” he asked.

Sarah tried to explain; Reatur gave credit where it was due.

But he did not understand the explanation. For one thing, Sarah did not have enough words. For another, the domain master suspected that some of the ideas were as strange as humans. As best he could gather, the picture-making thing needed a lot of light to see by. He supposed that made sense.

Sarah put the picture-maker into one of the pockets of the coverings humans wore. Reatur had only gradually realized those were coverings, not part of the humans’ skins.

From a different pocket, Sarah drew out something else. Reatur heard a click. Light streamed out of the thing, not in a single blinding flash but steadily and at a lower, more comfortable level. “Flashlight,” Sarah said. Reatur tried to remember the word; his language had no equivalent for it.

Sarah shone the light at Reatur’s feet, courteously keeping it out of his eyes. The light splashed over Biyal’s body. “The budding female?” Sarah asked.

“Well, of course,” Reatur said gruffly-humans had a gift for asking about the obvious.

“At the budding female I close look?”

It took several tries, backed by a good deal of gesturing, before Reatur figured out what Sarah meant. The domain master hesitated. He had cleared the chamber in the mates’ quarters by himself after Biyal died-he did not want other males to have anything to do with his mates, or even to venture into that part of the castle. But he had not kept the humans out of the mates’ quarters. They were too odd to worry about their planting buds on his mates. And poor Biyal would never bud again, that was certain.

“Look if you care to,” the domain master said at last. “Yes,” he added a moment later. Humans needed things kept simple.

He started back toward the castle. One of his eyes watched Sarah bend over Biyal’s corpse. That peculiarly human motion still struck him as grotesque. Humans could not widen, though. He was sure of that. They did the best they could with the weird bodies they had.

As did everyone else, he thought. That reminded him of the watch he was still posting on Ervis Gorge. Nothing whatever had happened there since Fralk-on whose eyestalks the domain master wished the purple rash-was urged to go back to his own side and stay there. Reatur wondered whether he was wasting his males’ time by keeping them at the gorge. He decided to leave them in place a while longer. Up against a rogue like Fralk, fewest chances were best.

The male dropped the lamp at Fralk’s feet; in fact, he almost dropped it on one of Fralk’s feet. “What’s all this about, Mountenc?” Fralk asked. He was both surprised and a little angry. As eldest of eldest, he was not often exposed to such rude behavior.

But Mountenc was angry, too. “This stinking thing didn’t even live as long as a mate, Fralk,” he snapped. “It doesn’t light up anymore, and I want my eighteen stone blades back for it.”

“I never said how long it would last, Mountenc,” Fralk pointed out.

“Four nights isn’t long enough,” the other male retorted. “I kept it on all through the dark so I could see to work, and now look.” He picked it up and used a fingerclaw to click the little switch that made the light come out. No light came. “It’s dead,” Mountenc said contemptuously, “and I want my blades back.”

“First let me see if I can make it live again,” Fralk said. He did not have the blades anymore. He had traded them for something else. At the moment, he could not remember what, but he had turned a profit.

From the way Mountenc was glaring at him with three eyes at once, he did not think the other male would care about that. “You’d better,” Mountenc said.

“I will do what I can.” Fralk was pleased to notice that none of his concern showed in his voice. He was a good deal less pleased when he remembered how many little lamps he had sold. If they all started dying, he was liable to end up dead himself.

By the time Fralk was done talking Mountenc around, though, the other male was halfway polite again. Of course, had someone given him the promises he had made Mountenc, he would have been happy, too. He wondered if he could make those promises good. Time to find out, he thought as he carried the defunct lamp over to the humans’ tent.

Next to the tent stood the thing-Fralk thought of it as a landboat-the humans used to travel about. It rolled on the round contraptions humans seemed to prefer to skids. Thinking about the flying boat that had almost fallen on him, Fralk reflected that humans not only seemed to like traveling, but also seemed very good at it.

That only made him wonder again why nobody had ever seen any of them before. Maybe they really did Come from the Twinstar.

As the humans liked, he paused beside the tent and did not go straight in. “Hello!” he called, and then added the human word: “Zdrast’ye!” Nothing happened. He hailed again. Still nothing. He said something unhappy, not quite out loud. Sometimes the humans went wandering through Hogram’s town on foot. He hoped they had not chosen today to do that. Today he really needed them.

He hailed again. Finally the entrance to the tent opened. Fralk was so relieved that he hardly minded the hot air that came blasting through the doorway. The human who looked out was still adjusting the outer skins he and his kind wore. “Brrr!” the human said, a word whose exact meaning eluded Fralk.

A moment later, another human appeared beside the first. This one was also playing with his outer skins and taking too long to do it for Fralk’s taste. Having only two arms made humans clumsy, he thought with a touch of scorn.

“Fralk, yes?” the second human said. He was the only male with a voice like a person’s, which made him easier for Fralk to name. He still found humans hard to tell apart by sight.

“Da, Katerina Fyodorovna.” Fralk said the name carefully; he still stumbled when he used human speech. He had learned, though, that the second part of each human’s name was a memory of his father. There, amid so much strangeness, was a something that made perfect sense. Back to the business in his claws, Fralk thought. He asked, “Is Valery Aleksandrovich here?” Of all the humans, he could speak with that one best.

The male Katerina moved his head back and forth, which Fralk thought weird but had come to learn meant no. “Shota, me here,” Katerina said. “Valery, Sergei-“ The human groped for a word. “Gone.”

“Gone looking, make pictures,” Shota said.

“Da,” Fralk said, to show he understood. The humans were as curious about Hogram’s domain as Fralk was about them.

Shota said something in his own language, too fast and complex for Fralk to follow. He made Fralk more nervous than any other human. Maybe it was a holdover from their first wary meeting, when Fralk had feared the human’s picture-making device was a weapon. Or maybe it was that Shota made the alarming yip Fralk had decided was human laughter more often than any of the others.

He was yipping now, as he reached out to touch Katerina in the area below the front of the other male’s head, between the arms. Katerina knocked his hand away; the smaller male’s face, always pink, turned a deeper shade of red. Humans’ colors did not mean nearly so much as his own folk’s, but the change, accompanied as it was by a hostile-looking gesture, made Fralk wonder if Katerina and Shota were about to fight.

But Shota said something else that made both humans yip. Katerina turned his head back toward Fralk, as Fralk might have turned a polite eyestalk on someone with whom he was talking. “You, ah, want what?” the human asked.

Fralk held up the lamp that had failed Mountenc. He clicked the little fingerclaw sticking up out of it that was supposed to make it light, then clicked it over and over, back and forth. “No light,” he said. “Dead. Can you fix it, make it light again?”

Shota scrambled down from the tent. “Give to me,” he said. Fralk put the lamp in his hand. The act made him notice the human’s two extra fingers. They did not make up for his missing arms, Fralk thought.

Shota shook the lamp. Fralk had done that, too, trying to make it work again. He had heard nothing and asked the human if he did. “Nyet,” Shota said. He bared the grinders in his mouth. “Not hear is good. Not-“ He made as if to throw the lamp on the ground.

“Broken,” Fralk supplied. “If it is not broken, why does it stay dark?”

Shota called something to Katerina. Then he turned the lamp upside down, so the part that lit was on the bottom. He twisted the lamp in his hands; to Fralk’s surprise, it came apart into two pieces.

Fralk extended an eyestalk to peer at what Shota was doing. The human was trying to pull out part of the lamp’s guts and having trouble. Muttering, he put down the lamp and drew off the outer skins from his hands. “Brrr!” he said again. He picked up the lamp, moving quickly now, and pulled out two cylinders. Under those outer skins, Fralk saw, fascinated, his fingers had claws after all, though they were small and blunt.

Katerina had gone back into the tent while Shota worked with the lamp. Now the smaller male reappeared and tossed Shota a pair of cylinders identical, as far as Fralk could see, to the ones that had just come out.

Shota put in the new ones and put the outer skins back on his hands. This time he said, “Ahh!” He twisted the two pieces of the lamp together, and it was as if th6y had never been apart. He clicked the little fingerclaw. The lamp lit. He handed it back to Fralk.

“Thank you,” Fralk said, relieved-Mountenc would be no trouble now.

Shota picked up the cylinders he had removed from the lamp. “These dead,” he said. “Use much, they die, not give-“ He ran out of words halfway through his explanation. Fralk got the idea, though. Somehow, light was stored in the little cylinders, and they held only so much. Mountenc had used his lamp all the time, so it failed faster than any other.

“They will all do this?” Fralk demanded in horror. The glow of the lamp he was holding caught one of his eyes. He hastily clicked the lamp off-why waste its precious life during the day? “All,” Shota told him.

He felt as tenuously supported as he had crossing the bridge back from the Omalo domains. He pointed to the cylinders Shota was still holding. “You have more of those, I hope?”

Shota’s yipping laughter had an odd quality to it, one Fralk had not heard before. It sounded somehow ominous. It was. “We have,” Shota said. “What you pay?”

No wonder Shota made him nervous, Fralk thought as the bargaining began. No matter how peculiar the human looked, his stalkless eyes were as firmly on the main chance as Fralk’s own, or even Hogram’s. Fralk knew no higher praise.

The prints emerged from the developer, one after another. As each came out, Sarah Levitt pounced on it like a cat leaping onto a bird. She had been impatiently pacing ever since she put in the roll of film, three hours earlier. “Any mall back home has a shop that’ll run prints out in an hour fiat, while I’m spending half my life waiting here,” she complained. “So much for high tech.”

Emmett Bragg was the only other person awake inside Athena. “The machines in those shops are about the size of a pickup truck, too,” he said. “They got this one small enough for us to take along. What difference does it make if it’s not quite as fast?”

Another picture came out. Even the roller was too slow to suit Sarah. She tugged the print free. “What if you need a picture sooner than in three hours?” she said.

The question was rhetorical, but he answered it. “Then you ought to think to bring a Polaroid along.”

She glared at him, thinking he was being sarcastic or patronizing or both at once. His face, though, was serious. “You mean it,” she said, surprised.

“Well, sure.” He looked at her across a mental gap perhaps as wide, some ways, as the one separating people from Minervans. “Get yourself good and ready beforehand, and the run you’re making is a piece of cake.”

“But-“ Sarah gave up. Emmett was a pilot first and then an astronaut; of course his world revolved around checklists. He even had a point, she supposed. But medicine was less predictable than fighters or spacecraft; things happened all at once instead of sequentially, and so many variables were running around loose together and bouncing off each other.

“Never mind.” Bragg came around to look over her shoulder. She heard him suck in a quick, sharp breath of air. All he said, though, was, “Not pretty.”

“No.” Sarah was almost disappointed that he had not reacted more strongly, before she remembered that he had been through Vietnam. If anything could give him what was close to a doctor’s clinical detachment, that was probably it.

The pictures were anything but pretty. No matter how alien Biyal’s body was, what had happened to it was grimly obvious, and the stark background of the field where Reatur had left it only made it more pitiful.

“This is how they get more Minervans?” Emmett asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, he went on. “Not much in the way of obstetrics hereabouts, is then:?”

“No,” Sarah said again. Then her helpless fury burst out. “There’s not one goddamn bloody bit of obstetrics here, and I don’t know if there ever will be, or even can be. You see the big wounds?” Her finger hovered over them, first on one print, then on another.

“I see ‘era,” Bragg said.

“That’s where each baby is attached to the female-attached by a big blood vessel. When the babies reach term, the skin over them splits and they let go and the mother bleeds out, all over the floor.” She had cleaned her boots several times. Biyal’s blood was still in the crevices.

“Anything you could do to keep it from happening?”

Bragg, Sarah thought, saw straight through to essentials, as with, she reluctantly admitted to herself, his comeback about the Polaroid. Such automatic competence was-daunting. She answered the only way she could. “I don’t know. I doubt it. I wish I could, but I don’t know.”

“You want the chance to try, don’t you?”

Startled, she swung around. He was closer to her than she had thought, well inside her personal space when they were facing each other. “How could you tell?” she asked. She did not pull back right away.

“Way you talk.” The crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes crinkled in amusement, but the eyes themselves were watchful as ever, a flyer’s eyes or, Sarah thought, a marksman’s. Being u.. targeted like that was faintly unnerving. But Bragg’s voice was light. “You sound like a test pilot going into training with a new machine.”

“I guess I do,” she said, laughing. “Only with this one, I’m not only not sure whether it will fly, but whether it ought to fly.”

The crow’s feet crinkled a different way. Sarah was not sure how it was different, but it was. “Why shouldn’t it fly?” Bragg kept with her metaphor.

“Because it looks-“ For a variety of reasons, Sarah did not feel like going on, but in the end she did. “It looks like Minervan females are just designed-evolved, whatever, to have one set of babies and then die. Pat’s trying to find out if it works that way with the animals here, too, not just the people, And I think the females have those babies young, really young-none of them is much more than half as big as a male.”

Bragg pursed his lips, sucked in air between them. “Doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for women’s lib here, does it?”

“It’s not funny, Emmett,” she said hotly.

“I never said it was.”

It was not an apology, but it was close enough for Sarah to let herself sag wearily as she said, “Suppose I can save a few females while we’re here. What happens then? Will they conceive again, and just die next time? Will they live and not conceive again? If they do that, can the Minervans handle the idea of adult females? I don’t think the question even arises here.”

“Is it your business to turn their whole society upside down?”

Bragg asked. “That’s what you’d be doing, sounds like.”

“I know,” she said unhappily. “But is it my business to watch people-intelligent creatures, anyway-die before they have to? And die like this?” She held up the pictures. As if to emphasize her words, another one came out of the developer and lay in its tray, mute evidence of horror.

“Maybe your business is just that. Minervans aren’t people- aren’t humans,” Bragg corrected himself before Sarah could. “We get into enough trouble back home, trying to ram our ways of doing things down our neighbors’ throats. Maybe you ought to just let these folks go to hell-or even heaven-their own way.”

“Maybe I should.” Regretfully, Sarah let it go at that. Bragg, as usual, was straightforward, logical, probably even sensible- and everything in her rebelled at what he was saying. If she ever thought she had a way to keep Minervan females from dying in childbirth, she would try it, and Minervan society would just have to take its lumps.

Bragg started for the galley. “I’m going to get something to munch on,” he said. “Want to come along?”

“Why not? God knows when-or if-Irv’s coming back to night, lie’s slept in Reatur’s castle a couple of times already this week. Even inside a sleeping bag-”

“That’s a cold bed,” Bragg finished for her.

She nodded. “And after looking at these pictures, I don’t think I’ll rest easy tonight, anyhow. I could use the company.”

The pilot gave a thoughtful grunt at that.

In the galley, he chose a packet of smoked, salted almonds. Tearing open the aluminum foil, he said, “I don’t suppose the Minervans have anything like beer.” He sounded wistful rather than hopeful.

“You know perfectly well they don’t,” she said, rehydrating a tube of apricots-all the food on Athena was in freefall-safe containers. “If you ever head away from the ship, make sure you take rations along. The local water or ice ought to be all right, but don’t try eating anything. You’d regret it.”

“That’s what you’ve been saying,” he agreed, crunching.

“Believe it,” she told him. “The more I find out about biochemistry here, the more toxic it looks.”

“Funny,” Bragg said. “Same basic chemicals, right?” At Sarah’s nod, he went on, “So how come they didn’t work out the same way they did back home?”

She held up a finger so he would wait while she swallowed. “Back home, life got started in the tropical seas. You could call the water here a lot of different things, but tropical’s not any of them.”

“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Bragg’s drawl thickened, reminding her of where he was from. A moment later, he was focused again. “Different conditions, you’re saying?”

“Exactly. Back on Earth, everything is geared to functioning well at high temperatures. Even animals that live in weather not much better than Minerva’s-polar bears and such-do it by using a lot of insulation to keep warm. But there’s no such thing as warm weather on Minerva, and from the biochemistry there never has been. Instead, all the adaptations have been to meeting the cold on its own terms. Minervan tissues are full of every different kind of antifreeze you can think of. Not tasty.”

“Like drinking your radiator, eh?” Bragg chuckled.

Sarah stayed serious. “Just exactly. The Viking results suggested that, but of course the biochemistry experiments were nowhere near done when-when Reatur smashed it.”

“And now it’s in his trophy room. That’s pretty strange.”

Bragg shook his head.

“I know.” Sarah nodded slowly. “I was in my senior year when Viking landed, and I was heartbroken when the transmissions stopped. I never thought then I’d meet the-person who stopped them.”

“Something to that,” he admitted.

“At the time,” she recalled, “I wanted to kill him.”

“You and NASA both,” Bragg said. “The scientists, any how. I was just getting into the program then, and I think the administrators all wanted to give Reatur a big fat kiss, for guaranteeing them all the budget they wanted from then on. They saw farther down the road than the whitecoat boys.”

“That makes once,” Sarah said tartly. Not being enamored of the NASA bureaucracy, she added, “We could have got here three years faster if we’d just piled up all our paperwork into one stack and walked from Earth.”

Bragg let out a loud bray of laughter, then half choked trying to swallow more. “Got to keep quiet,” he reminded himself. “Everybody’s asleep. Now that we’ve got a world making day and night for us again, no more sleeping by schedule-naturally, soon as I’d finally got used to it.”

Sarah looked at her watch. “Half past two,” she said. “I didn’t know it was that late.” She yawned, almost as if by reflex. “Even the extra forty minutes a day we get here won’t help much. Let’s go to bed.”

“Best offer I’ve had today so far.”

Sarah had been turning away. Now she glanced back at him sharply. His tone had been easy, but he was watching her, too.

Marksman’s eyes, she thought again, discomfited.

“To sleep,” she said, ready to be really irritated if he made something of that. He didn’t. But as she walked out of the galley, she still imagined she felt his gaze on her back. She did not turn around again; she was just as glad not to know for sure.

The sun skipped in and out from behind clouds. Ternat felt its warmth as he slowly walked south, back toward his father’s castle from the domain of Dordal. Summer really was on its way, he thought. The warm weather fit in well with his sour mood.

Reatur had said Dordal was an idiot, the domain master’s eldest remembered. If anything, that had been generous of Reatur. Dordal cared not a runnerpest voiding for the threat from across the Ervis Gorge. His eyestalks had wiggled until Ternat thought-hoped-they would fall off. Reatur’s eldest was not used to being laughed at. He did not care for it.

He did not care for anything about Dordal’s domain. Its crops were scrubby, and of varieties he did not like. Of its meat animals, the massi were too fat and the eloca too thin. Half the herders chewed ompass root-good luck to them if those scrawny eloca ever got loose and started running all over the landscape.

Maybe ompass root was Dordal’s problem, too, Ternat thought. His hands closed as he disagreed with himself: he would have smelled the fumes from the root. Dordal was a happy fool all by himself.

He had not even cared to learn about humans, though the bellow of their flying house had been heard in his domain. Some quiet questioning among the younger males in Dordal’s castle had made that plain to Ternat. But Dordal dismissed the roar as “a freak storm” and could not imagine humans as anything but ugly people.

Ternat almost sympathized with that. Dordal was plenty ugly himself.

The sun came out again and stayed out. The weather got warmer and warmer-easily warm enough to melt ice, Ternat thought. Yes, it was shaping up to be a miserably hot year. The humans might enjoy it-they were and somehow stayed hotter than anything alive had a right to be-but the excess melt it would cause would only make trouble and work for people.

As if thinking of humans were enough to summon them into his presence, Ternat saw a couple of their traveling contraptions leaning against a large rock. Ternat envied them those gadgets. He wished he had one, but his legs were both too short and too many for the thing to do him any good. But the round legs the gadget had-and, come to think of it, the humans’ flying house, too-looked to be better for travel than skids, at least when snow was not drifted deep.

Behind the boulder, Ternat saw a human’s foot. To judge by the posture, the human was lying down. That might be interesting, he thought. Except when sleeping, humans were no fonder of being horizontal than people were. And humans, so far as Ternat knew, did not have the habit of sleeping at midday.

He stepped off the path so he could get a better view of what was going on back of the rock. It was not one human back there, he saw after a moment, it was two. Well, that made sense-one for each traveling contraption on the other side of the boulder. But they were lying together in such a tangle of arms and legs that he had to look with three eyes before he was sure.

Under their outer layers, he saw, humans had the same pinkishtan skins they did on their faces-at least their legs, the uncovered parts, did. Ternat wondered what they were doing. Humans did a lot of strange things, but he had never seen them at anything so strange as this before.

They separated and got up off the square of woven stuff on which they had been lying. They quickly began putting on the outer layers for their legs. They were too engrossed in that to pay any attention to Ternat and soon had the task done.

Before they did, though, Ternat noticed they were different. The taller one had a dangling organ that reminded him a little of his own male parts, though those only came out when he was with a mate. He was sorry for the human for having only one, and thought it ludicrous for the thing to be sticking out there all the time.

Then he thought about the other human, the male without the organ… He suddenly stood stockstill in the field as the possible meaning of that sank in. Given what he had watched, it made only too much sense.

He hurried back to the path and started home as fast as he could go. Reatur had to hear this news right away. Maybe he would know what to do about it.

Pat Marquard put on her long johns as fast as she could; the skin on her thighs and calves, wherever they had not pressed directly against Frank’s, was all over gooseflesh. She pulled her pants over the thermal underwear and bent down to put her socks and boots back on. That was when she saw the Minervan. “We’ve been watched,” she told Frank.

“Huh?” His head jerked up; he had been tying his boots, too. “Oh, it’s just a native,” he said in relief. He grinned a lazy grin at her. “Maybe he learned something.”

“Maybe he did.” She rolled up the blanket, shivering briefly at the idea of fooling around without it on this planet full of permafrost, then carried it around the rock and strapped it behind her bicycle seat.

She wondered if the Minervan would come over and try to talk with them, but he seemed to have business of his own. With a touch of regret, she let him go on. Still, she supposed Irv had a point when he recommended against forcing contact on the natives. Things could get nasty if Athena’s crew made themselves unwelcome.

“Shall we get going again?” Frank climbed onto his bicycle.

So did Pat. “Sure.”

“Only way to keep warm is to keep moving,” Frank said as he began to pedal. He grinned again. “Well, almost the only way.”

“Uhhuh.” Pat looked at the ground instead of at her husband. The alleged path they were riding on was rough enough that he saw nothing out of the ordinary there. But while Frank whistled cheerfully and his breath steamed out as if it were the traditional aftersex cigarette smoke, Pat was anything but satisfied.

Frustration stretched her nerves taut. She had been so sure a couple of miles’ worth of isolation would let her find the release she needed, but it had not worked out that way. Now she didn’t know what to do.

She knew exactly when things had begun to go wrong: aboard Athena. She had always needed privacy to relax when she made love, and a curtain spread in front of a cubicle was not enough. Every noise from outside made her tense up, fearing-irrationally, she knew, but no less powerfully on account of that-that she and Frank would be interrupted. After most of a year, failure became as ingrained as success had been before.

It wasn’t, she told herself, that she didn’t love Frank. She did; she was sure of that. But it had been a long time now since she had left clawmarks on his back. She wondered if he still could turn her on.

She also rather wished she hadn’t thought about Irv just after yet another unsatisfactory time with Frank. From the noises she occasionally couldn’t help noticing on Athena, Irv had had no trouble keeping Sarah happy. Sometimes she wondered if the secret was transferable.

Reatur felt his claws dig into the smooth ice of the floor, a mute sign of his disbelief. “You’re sure?” he said for the third time.

“No, clanfather, I’m not sure,” Ternat repeated patiently, “but it looked to me as if the two humans were mating, and one of them seemed to have male mating parts-or rather, a single male mating part. Does that not imply that the other human is a female?”

“I suppose so,” Reatur said unwillingly. He still had trouble taking in what his eldest was telling him. “A female that acts like a male-by the gods, a female that has lived long enough to learn a male’s wisdom. Even from people as strange as humans are…” His voice trailed away.

“Why not just ask them?” Ternat said.

“Would they tell the truth? If I had that kind of female with me, would I admit it? It’s as unnatural as-as-“ Reatur stopped, at a loss for a comparison. He thought for a while, groping for a way to understand. “Maybe it means these females have never mated.”

“Then what were the two humans doing behind the rock?” Ternat asked. “Clanfather, you know as well as I, when the urge comes on you to mate, you mate.”

“And if you are a female, when you mate, you bud, and when you bud, you die. There is no other way. With us, with nosver, even with runnerpests it is so. How could it be different with humans?”

Ternat did not answer; he had no good reply to make. Reatur had no answers, either, only endless questions-and the same hopeless hope he always felt when he thought of the sorrow of the mates. What would Lamra be like, if somehow she could live on after the buds dropped from her? Reatur tried to imagine Lamra’s wild and sunny nature transformed by, say, Ternat’s years. He gave up; he could not make the mental leap.

Then he had another thought. As long as he was imagining Lamra surviving one budding, why not more than one? What would it be like, coupling with a mate who could appreciate the act with full wit, as well as skin? If the humans had that-

“They may be luckier than any people dreamed of being,” he said softly.

“Clanfather?” Ternat did not follow him.

“Never mind.” Reatur’s breath hissed out under his arms. “I suppose you’re right, eldest. I’ll just have to ask them.”

Ternat walking after him, Reatur began looking for a human. Usually he could not go down a hallway without stumbling over three of them; now that he wanted one, they were nowhere to be found. He finally saw one some ways off in the fields, pointing his picture-maker at a male pulling weeds between crop plants. The subject seemed uninspiring to Reatur.

When the human heard the domain master coming, he turned his head so his two poor trapped eyes would point the right way. The human hesitated before asking, “Reatur, yes?”

“Yes.” Reatur was not offended; he had trouble telling humans apart. This was one of the three that rumbled. “Irv?” he guessed. His odds of being right were better than one in three. He was certain neither the rumbler called Emmett nor the one called Frank cared about weeds.

“Yes,” Irv said, and Reatur felt pleased with himself.

The domain master turned an extra eyestalk on the male who was weeding. “Why don’t you go do that someplace else, Gurtz?” When Irv started to follow the male, Reatur muttered to himself. “You stay, Irv; I need to speak with you.”

“Reatur?.” The human plainly did not yet understand why the domain master had come to talk with him.

“You did well to get Gurtz out of the way, clanfather,” Ternat said. “The fewer who know of this, the better.”

“Yes, wouldn’t the gossip fly?” Reatur agreed. He gave his attention back to Irv, who was not following the conversation between the domain master and his eldest. Reatur tried to find a way to get around to his question an eyestalk at a time but saw no way to do anything but ask it straight. “Irv, are you a male or a mate?”

Quick and unambiguous, the answer came back: “A male.”

Reatur was surprised at how relieved he felt.

Still, finding out that one human was respectably male did not mean they all were. The domain master thought about the two most often in company with Irv and picked one of their names. “Is Sarah a male or a mate?”

The long pause before Irv answered told Reatur what he had to know. He felt his arms droop. Irv must have realized there was a problem, for even when he did reply at last, his voice was much softer than Reatur was used to from him. “A mate,” he said.

“I was right, clanfather,” Ternat said.

“So you were, eldest.” Reatur’s voice was as heavy as Ternat’s. Intellectually imagining something was a long way from having it confirmed, especially when it was something as hard to believe as this. “Are any other humans mates?” the domain master asked Irv.

He had to try that one a couple of times before he was sure Irv understood it. The answer he finally got rocked him from mouth to feet. Half the humans were mates.

“Sarah and Pat and Louise?” Ternat echoed, as stunned as Reatur.

“Do you use them?” the domain master asked. That required more explanations before Irv saw what he meant, and then even more as the human tried to respond. Human ideas of society left Reatur even more confused than he had been; he had not thought that possible. He got the salient point, though. “You do mate with them.’?”

“Yes,” Irv said.

Reatur forgot his own earlier speculation. “How could you bring them along with you, then, to die far from more of their own kind?” he asked, appalled at the human’s callousness.

Despite Irv’s growing fluency with his language, Reatur took a while to grasp that his wild guesses had been somewhere close to right. From what the human said, his people’s mates did not necessarily bud when they coupled-”What’s the point of coupling, then?” Ternat said; Reatur hushed him-and did not die when they budded.

“How can that be?” the domain master asked. “The blood-”

“We made different, people and humans,” Irv began.

“A good thing, too. I wouldn’t want to look like that,” Ternat said. Though he privately agreed, Reatur waved his eldest to silence again.

Luckily, the interruption had not thrown Irv far off stride.

“Different inside, not just outside.”

“Different how?” Reatur persisted. When buds fell from a mate, they left holes. Blood had to gush through holes, he thought. Maybe human mates did not drop six buds at a time. But even if-wildly unlikely notion-they only dropped one, that should be plenty.

“Ask Sarah how different,” Irv said. “Sarah knows of bodies.”

“All right, I’ll do that.” Humans’ characters were still hard for Reatur to gauge, but Sarah struck him as being a very straightforward and competent male… The domain master flailed his arms-not a male! “Ask a mate?”

Irv spread his hand, a take-it-or-leave-it gesture humans used. “Sarah knows,” he said. “Sarah knows of bodies, well and not well.”

“A doctor?” Reatur said.

“Doctor.” Irv repeated the word several times.

Reatur used the same trick when he was trying to remember something. He was glad to notice any point of similarity with humans, now that this gaping gorge of difference had opened up. The idea of learning from a mate still jolted him, so he asked, “Do any other humans know of bodies?” “Pat does,” Irv said after a moment’s pause.

Wondering at his hesitation didn’t the fool human know what his friends were good for? the domain master said, “All right, I’ll ask him.” Then he stopped-from what Irv had said, Pat was no more male than Sarah. “I’ll ask one of them,” Reatur said lamely. One of these days, he added to himself.

“Irv, you should have spoken sooner of this-difference- between humans and people.” Ternat sounded accusing. Reatur had trouble blaming him, but hoped Irv could not read his tone.

If the human did, he hid it well. “How?” he asked. “You thought us like you, yes?”

“Yes,” Reatur said. “Of course,” Ternat agreed.

“We thought you like us,” Irv said. “Till Biyal, we thought you like us. After Biyal-“ The human stopped.

Reatur wished humans really changed colors or did something he could gauge to show what they were feelin8. The movements of their strangely placed mouths told a bit, but not enough, at least not for him. He would have given a lot right then to be inside Irv’s head, to know which words the human was choosing and which he was casting aside.

Irv finally resumed, “After Biyal, we knew you not like us. We not know what you think when you know you not like us, so we not say. Now you know, now we talk. Yes, Ternat?”

“Yes,” Reatur’s eldest said reluctantly. The domain master made sure he did not let his eyestalks wiggle. Irv had done a neat job of turning things around on Ternat. However weird humans were-and the more he learned of them, the weirder they got-they were not stupid. He would have to make sure he remembered that.

Ternat got the point, too. “From how far away do you come, to be so strange?” he asked.

“Very far away.” It was all the humans ever said.

Now that Reatur was beginning to get a feel for both how odd and how closemouthed they were, he wondered what surprises lurked behind those three self-evident words. “I believe it,” he said, and for the moment let it go at that.

“Fralk, one of the humans is outside,” a retainer said. “He wishes to speak with you.”

“Do you know what he wants, Panjand?” Fralk asked.

“No, eldest of eldest,” Panjand said stolidly.

Fralk suspected that the servant had not bothered to ask. He felt the muscles around his mouth tightening in annoyance. He did not have time for humans now, even if he was Hogram’s liaison with them. The domain master had given him enough other things to do to keep any three males busy.

“Will you see him, eldest of eldest, or shall I send him away?”

Panjand asked.

“I’ll see him,” Fralk said mournfully. He put his pen beside the cured hide on which he had been writing and stepped away from the table. “Put a few more drops of porjuice into that bowl of isigot blood to keep it from clotting,” he told Panjand. “I’ll finish up these notes in a while, after I’m done with the human.”

Panjand widened himself. “Yes, eldest of eldest.”

Fralk, meanwhile, was gathering effusiveness around himself as if it were one of the outer skins humans wore. He opened the door Panjand had shut. “Zdrast‘ye,” he said, and then peered with three eyes at the human standing in front of him. “Sergei Konstantinovich,” he finished after a barely perceptible pause.

“Hello, Fralk,” the human replied in the Skarmer tongue.

“How are you?”

His accent, Fralk thought, was improving. “Well, thank you. What can I do for you today?” He discarded some of his expansive manner; Sergei was as businesslike as Hogram.

The human proved his instinct right, coming straight to the point. “You use axes, knives from us to fight, all, Omalo across, ah, J’6 Ervis Gorge?”

“Well, of course,” Fralk said. “I told, ah, Shota all about that.”

“Not use for that,” Sergei said.

“What?” Fralk said, though he understood the human perfectly well. “Why not? You traded them to us; they are ours now. What business do you have telling us what to do with them?”

Sergei hesitated, then said, “Humans-more humans-across Ervis Gorge.”

Fralk felt his arms flap limply against his body as he took that news in. Humans were so strange that he had never imagined there being more of them. “How many more humans?” he got out at last, wondering if all the lands he knew were going to be overrun by the funny looking creatures. It was not a pleasant idea; he would not wish a plague of humans even on the Omalo. On second thought, maybe he would.

“Six.” Sergei held up fingers so Fralk could not misunderstand him.

“These humans are of your domain?”

“Nyet,” Sergei said, surprising Fralk.

“Of your clan, then? Of the same first bud, I mean.”

“Nyet,” Sergei said again.

Exasperated, Fralk burst out, “Well, is your clan even friendly with theirs?”

“No,” Sergei repeated after another pause.

“Then why in the name of the first Skarmer bud do you care what happens to them?” Fralk’s satisfaction at losing his temper quickly dissipated in the effort he needed to get meaning across to the human.

Sergei replied as slowly, groping for words and concepts. “My domain, other humans’ domain not fight now. We your friends. Other humans friends with people across gorge. You, they fight, maybe my domain, other humans’ domain fight, too.”

Fralk opened and closed his hands several times. He had not thought about humans having politics of their own, either. He brightened. “How’s this?” he said. “We won’t harm these other humans at all; we’ll just use your axes and hammers on the miserable Omalo.”

“You get hammers, axes from us. What Omalo get from other humans?”

Fralk wished he were back inside, keeping records for a project that had nothing to do with humans-at least, he had thought it had nothing to do with humans. Humans had a gift for making difficulties all out of proportion to their numbers. “What do the Omalo get from these other humans?” he asked. “Not know.” Sergei spread his hands.

“Wonderful.” Along with the advantage surprise would give the Skarmer, Fralk had hoped the males who crossed the gorge would carry with them the superior weapons he had obtained for them from the humans. That would make him a hero as well as the rich male he was becoming. But now… “Do humans have weapons stronger than axes and hammers?”

“Yes. Our-“ Lacking the word in Fralk’s language, Sergei perforce used one from his own. “-firearms stronger. Stronger a lot.”

“Do these other humans also have firearms?” Fralk echoed the strange sound as well as he could.

“Yes,” Sergei said. “Not as good as ours, but yes.”

Fralk had a really appalling thought. “Would the other humans give firearms to the Omalo?”

“Not know,” Sergei said. “Not think so.”

That was something, anyway, Fralk thought. “Do they have hatchets and hammers? Would they give those to the Omalo?”

“Not know if have. If yes, they give, I think.”

As Sergei did not have eyestalks, Fralk could not even vent his feelings by wishing the purple itch on them. His dream of a quick, easy conquest aided by marvelous new weapons he personally had helped obtain from the humans looked to be just that-a dream. He tried to find something to be optimistic about and finally did. “At least,” he said, “the Omalo won’t surprise US.”

The reversal in the sentence left the human floundering, and Fralk was in no mood to help him along. Partially changing the subject, Sergei asked, “How you go across Ervis Gorge, fight Omalo?”

He could not have found a better question to restore Fralk’s good humor. “I was just keeping track of the frames involved when you got here,” he said. “We’re making them faster than we thought we could, and we should have plenty when the time comes.”

He repeated himself several times. “Frames?” Sergei said. He did not know the word, and context was not enough to give him its meaning. That made Fralk hope the Skarmer plan was something even these oh-so-clever humans had not thought of.

“Here, I’ll show you,” he said. “Come with me.” He led Sergei toward a large shed not far from where they were standing. As they walked, Fralk remarked, “You know, of course, that as spring turns to summer, water flows through Ervis Gorge.”

“Da,” was all Sergei said, disappointing Fralk, whose “of course” had been solely for effect. Then he reflected that humans, being so beastly hot themselves, would not find water as much a nuisance as people did. He had already noticed that they preferred it to ice. That, he thought, was their problem.

Inside the shed, half an eighteen of males-three crews of three-were busy using vines and dried massi eyestalks to lash curved pieces into frames that looked like bowls bigger across than a male was tall. “We’ll stretch hides over them, and then-“ He paused dramatically. “If we put them on water, they’ll stay on the top of it, even with a couple of males inside. We call them ‘boats.’ “He used the borrowed Lanuam word as if it were part of the Skarmer tongue, hoping Sergei would think his people had had the idea for themselves.

“Boats,” the human repeated. He was silent for some little while, looking at the frames. Then he asked, “In Ervis Gorge, ice, water, rocks all together, da?”

“Yes,” Fralk agreed. And yes, he thought, humans plainly knew plenty about water.

“You use boats with ice, water, rocks all together?. These boats?” Sergei pointed at the frames.

“Yes. I told you, they’ll stay on top of the water.”

“Bozhemoi,” Sergei said. “When ice, rocks, ah, touch boats, then what?”

Fralk had not thought about that. The Lanuam, from whom the Skarmer clans had bought the concept of boats, had never mentioned it. Maybe they would have if asked, but the Skarmer did not know the right questions. Having been on the other end of a few deals like that, Fralk admired the distant Lanuam and resolved to pay them back if he ever got the chance.

Now, though, he put the best appearance he could on things. “Most will not be hit at all; others will endure some damage and keep on. We should not lose many.”

“Bozhemoi,” Sergei said again. It was another of those annoying human words with no clear meaning, but Fralk did not think the human seemed enthusiastic.

“Hurry up,” Sarah said, hopping up and down. “I’m turning into an ice cube.” She was only wearing shoes, shorts, a T-shirt, and a bicycle helmet; the temperature hovered right around freezing.

Irv shoved the wide stepladder next to Damselfly. As soon as it was in place, Sarah bounded to the top, hitting only every other rung. Irv climbed up beside her and helped her down into the cockpit. When she was safely onto the seat, he swung down the cockpit cover and latched it closed.

Sarah held a checklist in her hand and went through it item by item. “Just like Emmett,” she said. Irv could hear her teeth chattering; Damselfly’s thin Mylar skin-glorified Saran wrap, Irv thought-did nothing to block sound.

He got off the ladder, carried it out of the way, and went to his station at Damselfly’s left wingtip. “Radio check,” Sarah announced through the little set that hung on his belt.

“Reading you fine,” he answered. “Do you read me?”

“Five by five. I’m going to charge up my battery now.” She started pedaling furiously, powering a small generator. After a minute or two, she said, “Thank God-I’m starting to warm up.”

Louise Bragg was standing by the other wingtip. “Battery holding its charge all right?” she asked.

Irv saw Sarah’s head move as she checked the gauge. “Looks real good,” she said. “I’m going to engage the prop now.” The big airfoil started to spin. Damsel. fly rolled forward. Irv and Louise went with it to hold the wing level, first walking, then at a run.

“Airborne!” Sarah shouted, so loudly that Irv heard her both over the radio and straight from the cabin of the plane for which she was not only pilot but also engine. “That’s always so smooth,” she added a moment later, much more quietly. “The first time I did it, I didn’t even realize I’d gotten into the air till my ground crew started cheering.” Then she fell silent once more, concentrating on her pedaling.

Damselfly gained altitude and began a slow turn toward Reatur’s castle. It was almost silent in the sky; only the clicking whir of the bicycle chain and the whoosh of air past the propeller revealed its presence, and they faded past notice by the time it had flown a couple of hundred yards.

“How’s it handle?” Irv called when he saw his wife was having no trouble keeping the ultra-ultralight in the air.

“No problem,” Sarah answered. “If anything, it’s easier than flying it on Earth. The denser air’s giving me more lift, just like they thought it would back home.” Her voice confirmed her words; she did not sound as if she were straining.

The Minervans working in the fields had not paid Damselfly much attention while the humans brought its pieces out of Athena and put them together. The locals had no idea what it was for. The only flying thing they had ever seen was the spacecraft itself, and Damselfly, Irv thought, was about as much like Athena as a feather duster was like a hawk.

But when the Mylar and graphite-epoxy contraption got into the air, the Minervans stopped whatever they were doing. They let out piercing hoots of amazement and pointed with arms and eyestalks both. Several came rushing over to Irv and Louise, still pointing and shouting excited questions at the same time.

Louise turned to Irv in some alarm. “What are they saying?” she asked. She and Emmett spent more time on Athena and less with the Minervans than the other four Americans and had picked up less of the local language.

“I don’t quite know myself,” Irv said. Enough Minervans were clustered around him that much of what they were asking came through only as babble. He also saw that many more had come to him than to Louise. That made him give a mental sigh. Even exhilarated as they were, the locals remained nervous of a mature female.

As he listened, he finally began to catch on to what the Minervans were saying. About what he should have expected, he supposed: What is it? How does it work? Can I ride on it? Can I get one?

He had trouble staying polite as he answered the last question; his mental image of a Minervan on a bicycle seat pedaling like a madman made him want to giggle. But the natives kept after him. Athena and the capabilities it represented were beyond their comprehension, but Damselfly they could appreciate.

“Whew!” he said to Louise when the Minervans at last believed him when he insisted the ultra-ultralight could not carry passengers, was not made for their shape, and was the only one of its kind. “They never thought of flying, so of course it looks easy to them.”

“I wonder what they’d think if we told them we’ve been to the moon and back eight years before anybody flew a person-powered plane around a one mile course.” Louise was Sarah’s backup on Damselfly and knew more about what had gone into its design than Irv did.

In any case, the anthropologist was more interested in the effect the plane had on the Minervans than in its technology. “If the next ship here brought a dozen Damselflies adapted for the natives-assuming you could-they wouldn’t need any other trade goods like the ones we brought, and they’d come horns showing a profit.”

Louise let out a cynical snort that sounded very much like one of Emmett’s. “That’s as good a reason as any for NASA not to let ‘era do it, and better than most.”

“I suppose so.” Irv looked north and east. Damselfly, cruising at not much more than a man’s height off the ground, was almost right down on the horizon. Irv thumbed the radio switch. “How’s it going, darling?”

“Important discovery-it is possible to sweat on Minerva. Who would have thunk it?” Irv could hear the effort in her words, and the way she spaced them so they would not interfere with her breathing.

“How’s Damselfly going to do as a picture platform?” he asked.

Suddenly fatigue was not the only thing putting pauses between her words-exasperation was there, too. “I’m busier than hell in here, just trying to keep this beast flying-I haven’t had a lot of time for pictures.”

She had a point. By airliner standards, her controls were crude to the point of starkness: a stick, a radio switch, a prop control switch, a prop pitch gauge, an airspeed indicator, a battery charge gauge, and the camera button. But no airline pilot had to make his plane go by himself.

Still, Irv said, “On the return leg, why not see how much altitude you can gain without wearing yourself out too badly, and squeeze off a few shots. They’re pictures we can’t get any other way, you know-the main reason we brought Damselfly along.”

“You mean it’s not just a special exercise bike for me? Thanks for the news.” Irv felt his ears grow hot under the flaps of his cap. But despite her sarcasm, Sarah pedaled harder, until she got the ultra-ultralight a good thirty yards off the ground. “Even with the battery and the denser air, this is plenty,” she panted.

“All right,” Irv said mildly.

Sarah was not quite appeased. “It had better be. Most crashes with this beast I could walk away from, but I’m up high enough now to break my neck.” She clicked off. A few seconds later she came back on, sounding worn and sheepish at the same time. “The view from up here is spectacular. I can see all the way over to Jotun Canyon.”

“Just looking ought to be plenty as far as that’s concerned,” Louise said sharply. “I wouldn’t want to fly over it, not with the funny wind conditions it’s bound to have. Damselfly’s not exactly built to handle gusts, you know.”

“Seeing it and flying over it aren’t the same thing. I’m going to let my altitude go now. I’ve shot a whole roll-that ought to keep you happy, Irv.”

“So it should,” he agreed, unembarrassed. Aerial photography had taught anthropologists and archaeologists a lot of things they had never noticed when they were stuck on the ground. Irv would have killed to get a Piper Cub onto Athena. That being in the dream category, he would cheerfully settle for whatever Damselfly could show him.

The ultra-ultralight slowly approached. The prop fell silent as Sarah stopped pedaling. Damselfly touched down as lightly as one of its namesakes.

Sarah reached up and popped the catch on the canopy, then opened it so vigorously that Damselfly shook, Irv trotted up with the special stepladder. He climbed to the top to help his wife emerge. The sight of her flushed sweaty skin-and of so much of it-forcibly reminded him how little he had seen of her lately, both in the figurative and literal senses of the word. He thought unkind thoughts about Minerva’s climate.

Sarah had the weather on her mind, too, but in a different way. “For God’s sake, get me some clothes,” she said after much too brief an embrace. “If I let myself stiffen up, I’ll be hobbling around for days.” As if to underscore that, she started to shiver.

She jumped down from the ladder. Louise handed her the warm outerwear. She scrambled into it, while Irv wished the engineer had been a little less efficient. He could have done with another hug.

“And now, as medical officer, I wish I could prescribe a good hot shower for myself. Unfortunately, the closest I can come is to wipe myself down and bake under the heat lamp for a while. Have to do, I suppose.” She started for Athena.

Irv and Louise knocked down Damselfly by themselves-

Sarah, after all, had done plenty in flying it. They stored the pieces aboard Athena; neither of them even thought about leaving the fragile ultra-ultralight out were the elements could touch it. A hailstorm or even a windstorm would turn it to junk in a hurry.

As they were carrying the tail spar, to which Damselfly’s rudder and elevators were attached, Louise looked at her watch. “I think I’ll stay aboard when we’re done here. We ought to be getting today’s transmission from Houston in about another twenty minutes.”

“I guess I’ll stay, too.” Irv patted the pocket where he had the roll of film he had extracted from Damselfly’s camera. “I’ll wait for this to run through the developer so I can see just what we’ve got.”

Louise did not say anything, but before she turned away Irv saw her raise an eyebrow. He silently swore at the developer for being so slow that it made obvious his real reason for hanging around Athena: He had every intention of warming up Sarah a different way after she turned off the heat lamp.

That hopeful notion came to naught, anyhow. Some of the males in the fields must have told Reatur about Damselfly, for the chieftain walked up just as Irv was carrying the last piece of the plane, the propeller, to Athena.

Reatur was full of questions and had trouble following Irv’s answers because he had not actually seen Damselfly up in the air. The only thing he had to compare to its flight was Athena’s thunderous arrival, and Irv had already thought once about how unlike were those two things covered under the umbrella of one word.

And so, fascinated and confused at the same time, Reatur kept trying to understand. He finally invited Irv to the castle to explain further. He was so polite about it that the anthropologist could not find any good way to say no. No doubt, Irv thought sourly as they walked along a path through the fields, Reatur thought he was doing him a favor.

By the time he got back to Athena, Sarah was asleep. Grumbling, he went back and fed the roll of film into the developer. Even as he did, though, he knew his mind was not on what the prints would show.

The three males stood at the base of Tsiolkovsky’s boarding ladder. Even to the inexperienced eyes of the two Russians aboard, they looked ill-kempt. “More seedy beggars,” Oleg Lopatin said, curling his lip in distaste.

“Yes,” Yuri Voroshilov said; from the chemist, it almost counted as a major speech. Lopatin would have wondered had much more come from him. If anyone could have stayed sane alone through a nearly three-year Minerva mission, Lopatin would have bet on Voroshilov. Assuming, the KGB man thought, that he was sane now, on which Lopatin reserved judgment. That Yuri was competent counted for more.

Beggars the Minervans were in the most literal sense of the word. They held out several arms apiece toward Tsiolkovsky. Lopatin clicked on the outside mike. He had not learned a lot of the local language, but he had heard that phrase too often to mistake it: “Give! Please give!”

Lopatin had no use for beggars. Had it been up to him, he would have sent them packing, and in a hurry, too. But the orders from Moscow were clear: do nothing to antagonize the natives. Lopatin obeyed orders.

All the same, he did not care for them. As he often did, he said, “Will you do the honors, Yuri Ivanovich?”

“Yes,” Voroshilov said again. He got some trade goods out of a box by the inner airlock door, closed it after him, opened and closed the outer one, and started down the ladder. Lopatin trained a machine gun on the Minervans below. There had been no trouble with the locals, but he stayed ready for a first time.

The Minervans recoiled when they first saw Voroshilov; these newcomers might have heard about humans, an amused Lopatin thought, but they had never set eyes on one before. One male let out a contralto shriek that would have made any movie heroine proud.

“You want what?” the chemist asked when he was on the ground. The Minervans pulled back again at the sound of his deep voice.

Then one of them, visibly gathering his courage, stepped toward Voroshilov again. He repeated the sad chant all three males had been making: “Give! Please give!”

“Here.” Voroshilov pulled out a pocket knife and briefly took off one glove so he could use his thumbnail to pull out a blade and show the male what the artifact was. The Minervan shrieked again, this time, if Lopatin was any judge, in delight.

Seeing their comrade rewarded, the other two males also came up to Voroshilov. He gave one of them another pocket knife, the other a chisel with a transparent gold plastic handle.

“Hot, yellow ice!” the Minervan exclaimed as he held the chisel up to one eyestalk so he could peer through it.

All three males made themselves short and fat to thank Voroshilov and were so happy they did not take fright when he bowed in return; Lopatin had seen other locals start running at what was to them a startling gesture.

As he always did, Voroshilov asked, “What you do with tools I give you?” And Oleg Lopatin, not for the first time, thought the chemist was much more animated dealing with the Minervans than he ever had been with his fellow humans. Voroshilov’s pale, rather thin features lit up; real expression came into his voice.

The answer he got was the one he and Lopatin heard most of the time: “Take them to Hogram’s town to get what we can for them.”

“And after that?” Voroshilov persisted.

Again the reply was familiar. “We hope we will have enough then to pay Hogram the back rent on our plots, so we will not have to give them up and come to the town for good to try to make a living there.”

“Good luck to you,” Voroshilov said. Inside Tsiolkovsky, Lopatin sardonically echoed, “Good luck.” The Minervan peasants would not earn as much as they thought for the trinkets Voroshilov had given them. Too many such goods from Earth were available around Hogram’s castle; almost every day, the Russians there reported another drop in price.

Well, the bumpkins would find that out soon enough. He watched them trudge off toward the town. Each of them kept a couple of eyes trained on Voroshilov as he climbed up into Tsiolkovsky. The locals would have a story for the rest of their lives, Lopatin thought.

“What do you suppose they’ll end up doing a few weeks from now?” he asked when his companion was back inside.

“Building boats,” Voroshilov said promptly.

“I expect you’re right,” Lopatin agreed. “Building boats, earning whatever wages Fralk and Hogram choose to grant them, living wherever they can, with only their labor to sell.”

“Proletarians,” Voroshilov said.

“Exactly so. The revolution will come here one day, just as it has on Earth.”

“Not now,” Voroshilov said with what sounded like alarm.

Lopatin made a mental note of that tone, but only a small one, because Voroshilov was right. The Minervans here were just entering a capitalist economy, not coming to its conclusion. And from what Lopatin had gathered from the Americans’ reports, the natives on the far side of Jotun Canyon were still frankly feudal.

Barring the genius of a Lenin, then, the time for the revolt of the proletariat was still far away. Lopatin had a very good opinion of himself, but he knew he was no Lenin.

“Back to work,” Voroshilov said, and headed off for his lab. A strange one, Lopatin thought as the chemist walked down the passageway. He had had the thought many times and still did not care for it. He wanted-he needed people to be orderly and predictable. Anything he did not understand, he mistrusted.

Voroshilov, for instance, had gone far longer than any of the other men on Tsiolkovsky before even trying to approach Katerina. He had gone so long, in fact, that Lopatin began to wonder if he was a homosexual who had somehow escaped all the screening for that kind of criminal behavior. Lopatin would not have much minded if he was; it would have given him a hold on the quiet chemist. But it was not so. As far as the KGB man could tell, Voroshilov was just painfully shy.

He waited until clanks and clatters told him that Voroshilov was busy again, then called up a computer index to which no one else on Tsiolkovsky had access. In it were his files on the other five crewfolk. He recalled Voroshilov’s. One of the documents was called “Poetry”-it was a transcription of the set of jottings Lopatin had found on one of his periodic searches through the ship. The scribbles themselves were back in their hiding place.

“Love songs,” the KGB man muttered under his breath as he read them again. They were amazingly good, amazingly sensuous, and every one had Katerina’s name in it. Just glancing at them made Lopatin wish she were there. She had not warmed much in his embrace during the brief time she let him share her cubicle, but he still savored the relief her body had brought.

Men were not like women, he thought thankfully, remembering the old joke about the fellow who came into a tavern complaining that the lovemaking he had just had was the worst he had ever known. When the man behind the bar asked him how he would describe it, he grinned and said, “Magnificent!”

Regretfully, Lopatin sent the poems back into the computer’s memory. He also sent a sharp glance back toward where Voroshilov was still working. Nobody with that unprepossessing an exterior had any business having all those fine words running around loose in his head. Lopatin doubted everyone on principle but felt real suspicion of anyone who concealed himself the way the chemist did.

Tried to conceal himself, the KGB man amended. If he ever needed one, he had a handle on Voroshilov, all right. He smiled. Katerina was a very nicely shaped handle, now that he thought of it.

The ball, a hide cover over soft teagfiber, flew past Lamra. She let out a frustrated squawk as she went after it. She had thought she had an arm in the right place to catch it, but somehow it got by her. It usually did.

She widened herself so she could pick up the ball. “Reatur always catches it,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

“Throw it back to me,” Peri said. When Lamra did not throw it back right away, the other mate’s voice got louder. “Throw it back to me! Throw it back to me!” Lamra still did not throw it. Peri came over and took it away from her. “Mine!”

Lamra snatched it back. She used a couple of free hands to hit Peri. She was older and bigger than the other mate, but that did not stop Peri from hitting her, too, and poking her with a fingerclaw. She yelled and threw the ball at Peri as hard as she could. She missed. The ball bounced away.

Neither mate cared about it anymore anyhow. They were too busy fighting with each other. Other mates came running to watch and to add their shouts to Lamra’s and Peri’s.

Lamra had taken control of the fight and was just about to tie three of Peri’s arms into a knot when the door to the outside world came open and Reatur walked in.

“What’s going on here?” he asked. “What’s this racket all about?”

“She took my ball away,” Peri said, squirming away from Lamra and pointing at her with the arms that-too bad! she hadn’t got to knot up after all.

“Not your ball,” Lamra said. She gathered herself to grab Peri again and really give her what for. Reatur turned an extra eyestalk her way and pointed at her with an arm that did not seem to have anything better to do. Regretfully, she subsided. She might have known he would notice.

“Back to what you were doing, the rest of you,” Reatur told the crowd of mates around Peri and Lamra. They went, thoughalmost all of them kept an eyestalk on what was going on. Even so, Lamra wished they would do what she told them to like that.

Maybe being big like Reatur helped.

He had been talking to Peri. Filled with her own not quite happy thoughts, Lamra had paid no attention to whatever he was saying. She was a little surprised when Peri, after squeaking, “I will,” hurried away. Several of the other mates were playing a game of tag. Peri joined them. In a moment, her trouble with Lamra forgotten, she was frisking about.

“Now you,” Reatur said to Lamra. He had not forgotten, even if silly Peri had.

“It wasn’t her ball,” Lamra said.

“I know that,” Reatur said. “You all play with everything here in the mates’ chambers, so how could any of it belong especially to any one of you? That’s not what I wanted to talk with you about, Lamra.”

Then he did something Lamra had never seen him do with any other mate, though he had before with her, once or twice: he widened himself down very low, so that he was hardly taller than she. She still did not know what to make of that-she felt proud and nervous at the same time.

“You ought to know better than to squabble that way with Peri,” he said.

“It’s not fair,” Lamra said. “She squabbled with me, too.” She saw Reatur’s eyestalks start to wiggle, saw him make them stop. That was just one more thing she did not understand: Why would he want to make himself stop laughing? Laughing was fun.

“So she was,” he said. “But she”-he lowered his voice a little, so the others could not hear-“is just an ordinary mate, and you, I think, are something more. So I expect more from you.”

“Not fair,” Lamra said again.

“Maybe not. Would you rather I expected less from you than you are able to give?”

“Yes. No. Wait.” Lamra had to stop and work that one through. Reatur was talking to her as if she were another male. His words were as badly tangled as she had hoped to make Peri’s arms. “No,” she said at last.

“Good,” Reatur said. “So you’ll behave yourself, then?”

“Yes,” Lamra said. Then she wailed, “I don’t want to behave myself!” The world suddenly seemed a more complicated place than she wanted it to be.

“I know you don’t,” Reatur said gently. “Doing it anyway is the hard part. It’s called being responsible.”

“I don’t want to be whatever you said-responsible. It’s silly, like not laughing when you want to laugh.” Lamra turned an eyestalk away from Reatur to show she was not happy with him. “And like widening yourself so you’re so short and fat that you look like a toy nosver.”

“Do I?” Reatur laughed then, so hard that Lamra doubted he could see straight. He also resumed his regular height. “Is this better?”

“Yes,” Lamra said, though she could hear the doubt in her own voice.

“All right.” Reatur hesitated. “How are the buds?”

Lamra looked down at herself. She was beginning to have a swelling above each foot, but the buds did not inconvenience her yet, and so she did not think about them very much. “They’re just-there,” she said, which seemed to satisfy Reatur. “How are Biyal’s budlings?”

She saw that she had startled Reatur; his eyestalks drew in, then slowly extended themselves again. “One mate has died,” he said. “The others seem to be holding their own. It won’t be long before we bring them back to live in here. The male is doing well.”

“I miss Biyal. She was fun to play with-not like Peri, who squawks all the time,” Lamra added pointedly. She let air hiss out from her breathing pores in quite a good imitation of Reatur sighing. “I suppose the new ones will be even more foolish.”

“I suppose they will.” Reatur turned an extra eye her way. “I’ve hardly ever heard a mate say she missed another one after that one-after that one budded,” he said slowly. “You remember more than most, don’t you?”

“How can I tell that?” Lamra asked. There Reatur went, confusing her again. “I only know what I remember, not what anyone else remembers.”

“That’s true.” Reatur was trying not to laugh again, she saw. He stopped for a while, then went on in a musing tone. “What would you be like if you could hope for my years, or even Ternat’s?”

“Don’t be silly,” she told him. “Who ever heard of an old mate?”

“Who indeed?” he said, and gave a sigh so much like hers that she could not help wiggling her eyestalks. He reached out and awkwardly patted her between her eyestalks and her arms. “All I can tell you, Lamra, is that I hope the male you bear takes after you. Having such wits around to grow would be precious.”

Lamra thought about it. She was not used to taking such a long view; being as they were, mates did not have occasion to. Finally she said, “You know, that would be nice, but I’d rather it was me.”

Reatur looked at her with all six eyes at once for a moment, something he had never done before. “So would I, little one. So would I.” Then he said something she did not understand at all. “I’m beginning to envy humans, curse me if I’m not.”

He left the mates’ chambers very quickly after that.